La Sexualidad en el Análisis: Escucha y Enactment [Sexuality in Analysis: Analytic Listening and Enactment]15

This Spanish-speaking panel aimed to explore an apparent dichotomy. In managing different expressions of a patient's sexuality, the analyst either might be aware of its vicissitudes in order to interpret it or he might find himself involved in an enactment with the patient. In this latter case, the analyst shares an unconscious phantasy of which he is unaware because of his own defensive needs (Steiner, 1993) and thus is unable to interpret. Can this dichotomy be sustained? This panel raised significant questions: are enactment and interpretation opposing ways of exerting the analytic function? Is enactment an obstacle to listening or is it part of the analyst's listening function? Does enactment reveal a deadly compulsive repetition or does it aim to repair what the patient's psyche cannot repair?

In her poignant presentation of a clinical case of a patient she had terminated several years ago, Ana-Maria Rizzuto focused on the importance of listening both to the verbal manifestations of sexuality of the adult patient and to the infantile expressions of psychosexuality. She lay on the line how, during the first two years, his intense sarcasm and the constant rejection of anything the analyst said led her to conclude that his narcissism could not tolerate interpretation; she opted for clarifications and other milder interventions. Having first seen her patient as a ‘depressed child’ she decided to maintain a containing exploratory function, in this way transmitting her will to keep working with him. Inspired by a dream, she gradually discovered a fantasy of the patient: his belief that the only possibility of feeling loved by mother was “having sex with her”. Her enactment consisted in reviving his childhood mother in her countertransference, and attending to the child in him, while neglecting the adult. She then asked him to look at his fantasized experience of having actually raped the analyst through his expressions of sexuality, and find how it felt for him as an