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Chair: Jorge Bruce.
Panellists: Jay Greenberg, William Glover, Sergio Lewkowicz, Anna Maria Nicolo and Gabriel Sapisochin.
This was an interesting panel that has an important background. The subject of enactment as a clinical fact became the object of this panel at the International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in Boston , continuing in Buenos Aires , London , Vancouver and now Cartagena . The sustained interest in the subject and the fact that the panel includes very experienced clinicians made it an interesting offer in our last Congresses. Organizationally, the panel consists of an anonymous clinical presentation that is offered to the audience, and each panellist brings their elaboration on the subject.
The vignette of Rachel, submitted by an analyst who remains anonymous, was read by Dr. Jay Greenberg. In it, the analyst described how in the beginning of the treatment of his patient, a young woman in her middle twenties, who he described as a “very delicate, seeming almost ethereal,” he proposed to her to remain seated during their sessions. After several months, he suggested to her to lie on the couch, without providing any conscious reason on his part, and in the sessions that followed this enactment new material emerged, and provided the basis of the material discussed during the meeting.
After the vignette was read, Dr Sapisochin opened the discussion by affirming that “psychoanalytic listening does not exist without meta-theories that give it a frame of reference.” This was a good beginning that made the experience of the discussion of the clinical material that follows a very interesting one.
The first to present was Dr Sapisochin. I will quote:
In recent decades, a solipsistic model of subjective development had been called into question in different psychoanalytic cultures. The clinical evidence that in every subject there are traumatic elements, as well as the idea that certain functioning of the mind is resistant to change through verbal language,