The Eye Sees Itself: Dissociation, Enactment, and the Achievement of Conflict*

Part I of the paper takes up the question of how it is possible for the analyst to see, experience, or understand the countertransference, which is exactly what her unconscious involvement with the patient blinds her to. Must the eye perform the impossible task of seeing itself? A clinical vignette illustrates the problem. The means by which we generally dig ourselves out is our development of an awareness of vague affective hints, or chafings. Yet the problem remains: Why should we be any more able to grasp affective clues to our involvement than we are to grasp our involvement itself? In Part II I suggest that clues that help in thinking about the dilemma of the eye seeing itself are to be found in the examination of dissociation and the conception of the self as multiple. This line of thought leads into the presentation of an interpersonal-relational theory of enactment. Therapeutic action depends upon the creation of new internal conflict between states of self. The clinical material is explored along these lines. Part III returns to the riddle of the eye seeing itself, showing that the problem is insoluble only as long as mind is conceived to be unitary and undivided (“singlemindedness”). If consciousness is multiple, the dilemma disappears.