Enactment: Toward a New Approach to the Therapeutic Relationship, edited by Steven Ellman and Michael Moskowitz,  Jason Aronson, 1998,  210 ps.

This volume is the latest in “the library of clinical psychoanalysis,” a series of books that have been edited by Steve Ellman. It attempts to help the psychoanalyst-clinician contextualize the concept of enactment through the inclusion of papers that historically can be seen as leading to our current understanding of enactment, as well as contemporary papers that attempt to further define and clarify this concept. Thus, questions such as What is an enactment? To whom does an enactment belong? How can we best, as clinicians, make enactment useful? and Are enactments necessary in treatment? are addressed in a variety of ways, with differing viewpoints and conclusions. As the editors state in the introduction, only contemporary American viewpoints are addressed; thus, the papers contain contemporary Freudian, self-psychological, and relational viewpoints. Although no specific conclusions are drawn (the book allows for a number of divergent viewpoints), one cannot read this book without seriously considering the concept of enactment and its implications in clinical practice.

In a sense, there are three sections to this book. The first section, which begins with a paper by Ellman examining Freud's changing viewpoints on transference, contains a number of papers on transference and countertransference that lead to our contemporary thinking about enactment. This section includes papers by Boesky, Sandler, and Jacobs, covering topics such as acting out, the role of the analyst's countertransference in enactments, and role responsiveness. One can see a gradual shift in attention in these papers from actions that result from the patients' transference responses to the consideration of the analyst's psychology to a more bipersonal, relational model. This viewpoint is fully articulated in Sandler's paper “Countertransference and Role-Responsiveness,” where the emphasis is on the “interaction” between the two parties in the analytic process.

In the second group of papers, contemp