By Christophe Herbert, Psychologist
The Frame as a Therapeutic Tool
A course by Christophe Herbert, Psychologist (enhanced by A.I.).
The frame is part of your everyday reality as a clinician. But do you actually treat it as a clinical instrument in its own right?
This course proposes a change of perspective: the therapeutic frame not as an administrative or ethical constraint, but as a living, meaning-laden space shaped by the relationship — one whose therapeutic value extends well beyond the words spoken in session.
Guided by the authors who founded and enriched the notion — Freud, Bleger, Winnicott, Kohut — you will build an understanding of the frame that is simultaneously theoretical and clinical, and immediately usable in your consulting room.
Course description
Few notions are as fundamental to clinical work — and as poorly covered in psychologists’ initial training — as the therapeutic frame. We are taught to install it; we are almost never taught to think it.
This course fills that gap with a rigorous, clinically operative reading of the frame, from Freud’s technical papers to the contributions of contemporary self psychology. The landmark authors provide the scaffolding: Bleger and the silent frame, Winnicott and holding, Kohut and the experience of empathic reliability — an understanding that goes far beyond rule-following.
The course then takes apart the concrete components of the frame — time, space, fees, confidentiality, the therapeutic contract — to reveal the deeper clinical meaning of each: every element analysed as an organiser of the relationship, addressing conscious and unconscious messages to the patient.
The third module reaches the working heart of the matter: breaches, transgressions, acting-out, attacks on the frame and tests of the limit. Events therapists usually experience as obstacles are recast as clinical material of the first order — for those who know how to read them.
The fourth module makes the decisive turn inward: toward the therapist’s own relationship to the frame, and what their own breaches say about personal history and countertransference. Supervision and personal work appear here not as pious advice but as concrete instruments for strengthening the internal frame.
The course addresses all clinical psychologists, whatever their setting. It is built to enrich practice immediately, deepen clinical reflection and durably nourish the therapeutic stance.
4 learning objectives. By the end of the course you will be able to:
- Place the frame within the history of clinical and psychoanalytic thought. From Freud to Kohut by way of Bleger and Winnicott, you will command the theoretical foundations that made the frame a central clinical concept rather than a technical formality.
- Identify and analyse the concrete components of the frame in your own practice. Time, space, fees, confidentiality, the explicit and implicit contract: each read as a meaningful clinical organiser carrying conscious and unconscious messages to the patient.
- Recognize breaches of the frame and put them to clinical use. Lateness, absences, unpaid fees, out-of-session requests, acting-out, attacks on the frame: you will have the concepts to turn these events into therapeutic material — and to tell a considered adaptation of the frame from its unreflective erosion.
- Assess and strengthen your own internal frame. You will be able to trace how personal history and countertransference shape your holding of the frame, and to see the role of supervision and personal work in building a stable, reliable clinical presence.
Knowledge assessment and certificate. The course includes slide-illustrated videos and a training certificate.
Trainer: Christophe Herbert, Psychologist. Psychologist specialised in the psychotherapeutic care of victims and the severely bereaved. Director of H4 Éditions.