Process II and Ethics

Second Year Adult Psychoanalytic Training (APT)
2022-23, 2nd Trimester — Fridays, 1:45-3:15pm
Diane Wolman, MSW

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January 6, 2023 — Understanding Enactments

[42 pages]

Enactments are usually unplanned, unconsciously triggered affective communications between the analyst and patient.  They are frequently highly charged and have an element of both members of the analytic dyad feeling “out of control.”  Once feared as a sign of improper technique, they are now understood to be ubiquitous in psychoanalytic treatment and, many, myself included, would argue, are central to the human connectedness necessary for analyst and analysand to forge a true therapeutic bond. Schore discusses right brain structures from the neuropsychoanalytic perspective of regulation theory and he outlines the essential role of implicit affective responses in psychotherapeutic change.  He contends that direct access to these right brain implicit processes by both patient and analyst is central to effective treatment. Ginot explains that by embodying the most intense manifestations of transference-countertransference interaction, enactments expose and repeat some of the fundamental building blocks of the patient’s earliest self and other representations while simultaneously engaging some of the analyst’s own unconscious relational schemas.

Schore, A.N. (2011). The Right Brain Implicit Self Lies at the Core of Psychoanalysis. Psychoanal. Dial., 21(1):75-100.

Ginot, E. (2007). Intersubjectivity and Neuroscience: Understanding Enactments and Their Therapeutic Significance Within Emerging Paradigms. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 24(2): 317-332.

“Prosody (Definition and elaboration)”  Handout