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Chair: Alain Gibeault
Panellists: Sergio Lewkowicz, William Glover, Jay Greenberg, Clara Nemas, Ana Maria Nicolò, Gabriel Sapisochin.
Alain Gibeault (Paris) introduced the working model of this panel, which has previously been used at two IPA Congresses, in Boston and Buenos Aires. The participants concentrate on anonymous clinical material and provide their reflections separately, without having read the comments of the others, in order to foster the spontaneity of the discussion. Stressing the current understanding of enactment as an event that involves both patient and analyst, Gibeault prepared the ground for the discussion of the different conceptualizations of enactment, either as a failure to work-through the analytic process, or as the irreducible expression of certain unconscious psychic elements that can only be represented through dramatization, or even as part of a continuum which is involved constantly and at all levels of the analytic relationship.
The material presented comes from a session that took place in the first year of analysis with a 35-year-old male patient that the analyst calls Mr Little Pan. He is presented as an elegant, tall, thin man who speaks calmly and appears shy. His wife had called the analyst to set an appointment following her husband suffering a breakdown after he had been invited to assume more professional responsibility. He had felt paralysed with fear and had sudden bouts of crying. His fear of failure had caused him to miss jobs and relationship opportunities in the past. He would repeatedly apologize to his wife for his lack of courage. The analyst, who knew his patient's wife, felt reminded of her by his mannerisms that appeared to be in stark contrast to his bold haircut. The analyst describes how, after three months of face-to-face therapy, feeling more integrated, the patient decided to start coming three times a week and to use the couch. At a certain moment of the session, “an afternoon session like any other,” the an