The Tailor-Made Analysis: The Analyst's Adaptation to the Patient and the Question of Time

This paper considers Ferenczi's views about the need for an adaptation of the analyst to the patient through a flexible management of time during some periods of the treatment and compares his ideas to the ones put forward by Bollas regarding day-long sessions that provide a new experience of care to the patient. The author argues that changes regarding the expansion of the analytic hour, adapting it to patients' needs, is an old but still valuable theme for experiencing the boundaries of clinical practice that also brings countertransference aspects into play. Clinical material is used to illustrate the discussion in a contemporary encounter with Ferenczi.