Bernard Penot : Face-to-Face Consultations and the Psychoanalyst

We can work psychoanalytically with the couch or face-to-face, what is important is that the analyst know how to use the conditions best-suited to allowing the patient to start and carry on as far as he wishes a step towards subjective appropriation of his existence.
The author describes what may underlie a recommendation for a face-to-face beginning to a psychoanalytical treatment: more than the narcissistic pathologies or necessity of the psychoanalyst’s benevolent gaze, these are cases where a disorder of the subjectivating function is in play.
So in face-to-face work the patient will be able to perceive (de visu) more the drive charge of the psychoanalyst’s reactions, and the latter’s task will be to reprise the initial conditions of subjective appropriation that have been hampered.

Adolescence, as the threshold of obligatory subjectivation, lends itself particularly well to this arrangement.