Enactments: Convergence And Divergence

I THANK THE EDITORIAL BOARD of Contemporary Psychoanalysis for inviting me to write my original article, for asking two such esteemed analysts to comment, and for welcoming my reply. I also thank Judith Chused and Owen Renik for their careful reading, their provocative and thoughtful challenges, and their courteous and respectful attitudes. Both have provoked me to refine my thinking. I here compare the positions of Chused and Renik with each other and respond to their comments about my article.

Chused and Renik have very different ways of defining and speaking about enactments, and this also bears on their comments to me. Chused defines enactments as actualizations of the transference. This phenomenon occurs periodically and reflects a lapse in the analyst’s control over countertransference. This analytic problem can be converted into a gain if the analyst eventually detects it and interprets it as a jointly constructed acting-in of key themes in the patient’s internal world. This is similar to Edgar Levenson’s concept of transformation and Joseph Sandler’s role responsiveness. Neither of these theorists, however, place the negative cast of lapse on this interaction, for they see such enmeshments as not only inevitable but at the core of mutative action. Both also view enactments as in process much of the time, more of an everyday phenomenon than Chused’s description of unusual moments. Renik speaks of enactment in a very different way and comes closer to Benjamin Wolstein’s thinking about analytic interaction. As I understand Renik, enactment is synonomous with the concepts of subjectivity and of countertransference. Renik’s irreducible subjectivity depicts an analyst who is always countertransfering. His concept of enactment refers to the absolute impossibility of the analyst as person to be, even for one moment, out of the picture in analytic interaction. Renik is thus more radical than Levenson,