Enclaves and Excursions

I wish to call attention to two hazards for the analyst intrinsic to the conduct of psychoanalysis. I shall name these ‘enclaves’ and ‘excursions’. In the course of clinical work an analyst may be at risk of so responding to his patient that he forms an enclave, or takes an excursion out of analysis, and thereby deforms the psychoanalytic situation so that the therapeutic process is interfered with or even halted. I shall first illustrate what I mean by an ‘enclave’ by describing the case of Miss A.