Can the Analyst Think While Enacting?1

Moss grounded his Introduction in Freud's notion that primary and secondary process each aim at wish fulfillment. From this, Moss infers that ‘thinking’ and ‘enacting’ cannot be reliably separated. Thinking about an object can satisfy the same set of wishes whose repudiation had made thinking possible. When a patient commands our attention we cannot reliably separate our voyeurism from our epistemophilia. Moss asked: ‘How can we describe the links that both bind and separate thinking and enacting?’

Henry Smith began his paper by summarizing four different definitions of enactment, each representing a different degree of involvement on the analyst's part. His own view is that enactment is a continuous process in every moment of every analysis, determined not only by the patient's but also by the analyst's own unconscious fantasies, wishes and defenses, both parties actualizing their own internal worlds. Hence, not only the analyst's doings but even the analyst's interpretations and the thoughts that precede them are already part of the enactment. As opposed to considering all enactment as harmful, Smith argued that enactment both moves analysis forward and retards it simultaneously. How this balance will play out cannot be determined in advance.

Smith presented two illustrative cases. The first was a woman who wanted him to encourage her sexual excitement rather than interpret her aggression. One day she noticed he was distracted and commented on it, saying that she was too ‘good’ to ask what he was doing. He interpreted her defense against her aggression but it turned out the sound of his voice aroused her sexually. If the sound of his voice aroused her, how could he interpret anything without exciting her in the way she wished? He argued that this was the cardinal situation in all analysis. Analyst and patient are inevitably and continually enacting what they are attempting to analyze. He further illustrated how anything he might say or not say, no matter how ‘neutra