Enactment: Rediscovering a New Psychoanalytic Technique in an Old Freudian Text

The author hypothesizes that Freud had a clinical intuition about a new theory of psychic development, and a new vision of psychoanalytic technique, by introducing his concepts of Agieren and compulsion to repeat (Zwange zur Wiederholung) in his 1914g paper, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through”. It is postulated that this view remained in the Freudian model as a private, implicit theory, and was not taken up for many decades in the analytic movement. A re-reading of this text suggests Freud conceived of a psyche that contains registers of early experiences, which would never have been conscious to the patient. These experiences can be known, worked through, and transformed afterwards, by being repeated in action within the frame. The author proposes that “enactment” is the royal road for access to the intrasubjective registrations of early intersubjective interaction, which previously he has called psychic gestures. He considers that certain psychic gestures of the analysand become psychic gestures of the analytic couple, which are jointly dramatized within the transference-countertransference field. The pair’s constant working through, in order to dis-identify themselves from this relational script of the patient's mind, is the starting point for co-production of something new and hitherto unknown.