The Psychoanalytic Field

        If, and mine is a highly tentative and provisional “if,” the parental trope is to have any relevance at all in analytic practice, perhaps it would be more consistent and indeed useful to argue that it is precisely the analyst who occupies the role of the “child” that is always on the lookout for opportunities to elicit more playful stories, fantasies, and associations from an “adult” analysand who, often enough, wants nothing more than to resolve life’s dilemmas as concretely and expediently, which is to say as un-psychoanalytically, as possible.