Course Title: What Holds the Clinical Encounter: Frames, Settings, Encuadres (12 CE Credits, IL)
Instructor: Edurne Chopeitia, MBA, CMHC
Meeting dates (2027): January 23, 30; February 6, 13, 20, 27,
Meeting Time: Saturdays; 9:00 AM–11:00 AM CST
Location: via Zoom
Course Description:
A decision is made about phone versus video. A fee has to be raised. A vacation interrupts a difficult stretch of treatment. A first email arrives before we have ever heard the person's voice. A supervisor suggests the patient would benefit from higher frequency. One patient notices our new hair color; another, punctual to every session, is inexplicably late. Moments like these are usually treated as logistics, administrative details to be managed so that the "real" therapeutic work can proceed. This course proposes instead that they are crucial to our work: they reveal the work of the unconscious. Every treatment rests on quiet constants: the room and its furniture, the frequency of sessions, the fees, the theories we hold dear, our psychoanalytic heroes, even our accents and the languages we speak; from the material arrangement of the office to the societal structures that make treatment possible. Thinking analytically about these decisions, and about their shifts and turns, provides clinicians with a powerful instrument for understanding their patients and themselves.
Working from the clinic toward theory, we will take up questions every practitioner face: What do we agree to when we begin a treatment, and how do we unveil what remains unspoken? Why do some patients (and some therapists) experience a schedule change as catastrophic while others barely register it? What travels with us when the office becomes a shared screen? What are our own implicit constants, and when do they become our blind spots? Our guide will be the Argentinian psychoanalyst José Bleger, whose classic paper on the encuadre (translated as both "frame" and "setting") proposed that what stays constant in a treatment quietly houses the earliest, most undifferentiated layers of the personality. Building on this insight, the course treats the frame as a source of invaluable clues about who the patient is, their relational patterns, and possibilities for growth. Reading Bleger's pioneering paper closely, in conversation with analysts from other traditions and with vignettes brought by the instructor and participants, we will build a shared vocabulary for the frames at play in every treatment and for the clinical decisions they demand. All clinical material will consist of composites or fully de-identified vignettes. We will learn to recognize when the frame is silently doing its work, to read the meanings that surface when it shifts or breaks, and to put those meanings to clinical use.
Biographical Information:
Edurne Chopeitia, MBA, CMHC is Visiting Faculty at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis, where she previously taught the Psychoanalytic Explorations course "Our Therapeutic Frames and Settings" (2025). A clinical psychologist trained in Uruguay who has lived in the United States for over 25 years, she is a candidate in the graduation phase of the Adult Psychoanalytic Program at the Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute, where she recently presented the case conference "What Holds the Work: A Clinical Translation of the Psychoanalytic Setting," following a completed analysis from first contact to termination. Her teaching focuses on the encuadre (the psychoanalytic frame in the tradition of José Bleger and the Río de la Plata school) and its translation into contemporary North American practice, including teletherapy and hybrid settings. She was previously Adjunct Faculty at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay (UCUDAL), teaching Psychodynamic Assessment and Psychodiagnosis, Psychodynamic Organizational Psychology, and Psychoanalytic Psychopathology. She maintains a private practice in Georgia, offering brief and long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy, mother-baby and perinatal therapies, and consultation to adults and couples, in person and teletherapy, in English and Spanish.