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In the soliloquy in act 2, scene 2, when Hamlet first stumbles on the idea of the play within the play, he muses to himself: “I have heard / that guilty creatures sitting at a play / have by the very cunning of the scene / been struck so to the soul that presently / they have proclaimed their malefactions / since murder though it have no tongue, will speak / with most miraculous organ….” In this engaging, thought-provoking book Gil Katz suggests that this most miraculous, tongueless organ can be compared most fruitfully to what he calls the enacted dimension of psychoanalytic process. Katz, like Shakespeare, is suggesting that the unconscious can be “outed” through other than linguistic pathways: it can “speak” through the miraculous organ of enactment. In fact, when Hamlet stages the play within the play a guilty Claudius “speaks” nonverbally: he leaves the theater abruptly, his wordless guilt announcing itself in a dramatic enactment. Katz uses the concept of the play within the play to suggest a double-tiered complexity that informs the drama of analytic process: its language component and its enacted dimension.
For thirty or more years this “most miraculous organ,” this enacted dimension of therapeutic process has engaged the science of mental conflict (as Brenner called psychoanalysis), as a new way of thinking about the complexities of analysis and how its mysterious ministry works. The classical model suggested that once the fundamental rule had been announced to a cooperative analysand, the analyst's evenly hovering attention would monitor the flow of free associations as the unconscious gradually became more and more “comfortable” revealing itself to both parties of the analytic dyad. When resistance of any nature, dynamic or descriptive, interfered with this revelatory flow of information, this alert impartial attention of the analyst would detect the interference to the