15

Taking up Marty's concept of maternal function in dealing with patients whose primary experience of satisfaction seems to have failed, the author emphasises that this is inseparable from a deep instinctual movement that he calls `female', borrowing a term from Michel Fain. He works out the theoretical implications of femaleness in relation to four points?: the question of the countertransference, of which he puts forward an expanded vision?; the theory of the setting in its third and maternal aspects?; the use of language in these treatments and the connections between the form and the content of the analyst's interventions?; and, finally, the activity -?passivity dialectic as it is brought into play in the analyst in these situations.