You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In The Play within the Play: The Enacted Dimension of the Psychoanalytic Process, Gil Katz suggests that ongoing enactments between analyst and patient represent a significant dimension of every psychoanalytic treatment. In using the term “enactment,” Katz is referring to how patient and analyst actualize aspects of their unconscious processes through the actions they perform in the treatment relationship. Applying Loewald's concept of the interpsychic or the connection between the unconscious processes of therapist and patient, he maintains that patient and therapist enact patterns of interaction—the play within a play—that reflects how they have activated one another's unconscious processes. In Katz's view, these enacted patterns provide a rich source of information about the patient's central unconscious conflicts. Coming to understand this enacted dimension of the therapeutic process represents a principal
way the treatment dyad can learn about the patient's previously unformulated unconscious thought.
Extremely knowledgeable about the various definitions of enactment, Katz contrasts his model with other theorists who have utilized this term. He relates enactment to associated analytic concepts such as the third, intersubjectivity, and cocreation. This comparative effort makes the book useful for everyone who wants to be informed about the evolution of the concept of enactment, its varying definitions, and its relationship to other psychoanalytic ideas.
Katz's book is a compilation of previously published articles that include a number of his own case illustrations as well as clinical vignettes by analysts such as Sandler (1976), Renik (1993), and Casement (1982, 2000), whose works are central to the enactment literature. These illustrations show how broadly his model can be applied, help ground his ideas in clinical experience, and make his book an informative teaching tool.
Developing Freud's (1914/1958) view that repetition in action represents an important m