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The panel presented varying perspectives on the role and nature of nonverbal interventions in therapeutic action. After the panelists gave their varying views on the topic, open discussion was conducted with the audience in a small-group format, with panelists and other facilitators active in each group. The formal presentations will be summarized here.
Chair Judith Chused described an evolution in psychoanalytic thinking about therapeutic action. Psychoanalysis began as “the talking cure,” with verbal interventions getting the most attention, both by practitioners and in analytic training. Remembering was contrasted with repeating, and the assumed goal for the analyst was to facilitate the patient's cognitive integration of what was being experienced and to convert repetitions into remembrances. The analyst was to avoid participating in interactions being sought by the patient (these were assumed to be unconsciously motivated re-creations), and instead was to put into words whatever the patient sought to re-create. Countertransferences were seen as an impediment to analytic work, as problems for which the analyst was to seek analytic help.
More recently, countertransferences and enactments have been generally acknowledged to occur in every deeply felt analysis, their absence being understood as a signal to the analyst that true engagement with the patient is not occurring (though many analysts believe that exploration and articulation in words is necessary if enactments are to be therapeutically useful). It has become evident that many implicit communications occur between analyst and patient and have therapeutic effect, often without ever being explicitly verbalized. For example, analysts' willingness to “wear” the attributes of a patient's transference perception, acceptance of