From bastion to enactment: The ‘non-dream’ in the theatre of analysis1

In this paper, the author's objective is to discuss models that express what occurs in the analytical situation. He demonstrates how early models relating to painting and sculpture, to history and archaeology, develop into other models that refer to the relationship between two people. He studies in depth the Barangers' ‘analytical field’ with its obstructive bastions as a background to understanding what is currently valued as intersubjectivity in psychoanalysis. The container-contained model and the phenomenon of ‘recruitment’ are also discussed. The author uses clinical material to demonstrate how these models are linked to ‘enactment’, and a study of this concept provides evidence of the importance of the visual image, the dream and ‘non-dream’, the ‘affective pictogram’, as privileged aspects for the understanding and evolution of thought in the analytical process. Its importance leads to a proposal of a model that uses the theatre as a metaphor for the analytical process. In this model, analyst and patient both participate as characters in the scenes, and simultaneously as their co-authors. The analyst should also be responsible for the direction of scenes, as well as acting as critic. His task is to prevent obstructive conspiracies (the ‘non-dream’) and find new meanings for the scenes, thus allowing the development of new scenes and plots, and the enlarging of the mental universe.