Enactment: Listening to psychic gestures*

The growing acceptance since the turn of the millennium of a psyche open to exchanges with others from the earliest stages of life has prompted the conception of clinical approaches for listening psychoanalytically to the effects of this archaic link on the mind. On the basis of clinical material, the author advocates analytic listening through the medium of enactment, which he sees as a conceptual tool to facilitate psychoanalytic understanding of what is dramatized by the analytic couple, over and above the semantic content of the patient’s words. In addition to the dyad of free association and evenly suspended attention for gaining access to the dynamically repressed, the author contends that listening through the medium of enactment is the royal road to what he calls the psychic gesture. This is a form of image-based psychic registration of the early interaction with objects that preserved the infantile subject from primal representational helplessness. The author argues that what is enacted by the analytic couple is an irreducible intermediate stage in any analytic process, since it enables the patient to gain insight into the intersubjective genesis of his psyche and to take ownership of his destiny.