The frame is the “home” or base of the psychoanalytic process, which involves a person seeking help and the analyst’s offerings in response. The analyst has always been responsible for assuring safety. When in-person work was a given, the warmth and privacy of the consulting room were often equated with safety and care.

In contrast, I will discuss the dark side of the frame: the danger that the in-person setting evokes for some adults carrying childhood trauma due to abuse or neglect. It was the reluctance of some patients, post-pandemic, to stop teletherapy and return to my office that alerted me to the danger that in-person work posed, and to the defense that the “screen” offered. Bleger (1967) saw that people dominated by a primitive organization, as some who suffered trauma are, embed that organization in the frame for stabilization. A change in the frame breaks into this stabilization, forcing early anxieties into the open. While challenging for both patient and analyst, this may provide a means of living trauma anew, toward healing. I will use vignettes to illustrate these phenomena, including the disorganizing impact of my in-person “otherness” on some people who had only worked online, and bodily fragmentation due to the rupture of a stabilizing frame.