Communication within the Analytic Dyad: A View of Enactment

Enactment is the current buzzword, the latest concept to elicit a premature rush of affective appeal. With all such group movements, as they gain momentum, the challenge is to remain open for potential advances, while preventing exaggerated positions. Popularity and trendiness do not further scientific issues. has said “Progress has as many victims as beneficiaries,” and “Progress is an alternation of excesses.” I have found these repeatedly true in psychoanalytic debates and theoretical developments, at least at the level of major purported new methods or systems of thought. Most new heralded alternative schools leave in their wake lacunae in theory larger than the spaces they claim to fill.

Psychoanalysis as theory, technique, and research method are reciprocal and operationally fused. A change that goes to the heart of psychoanalysis in any of the three meanings of the term alters the essence of the other two to a degree that interferes with common discourse. Observations lead to theory, theory points the way to therapeutic method, while psychoanalytic research is bound to a fidelity to the givens, requirements, and consequences of all three. Any significant modification of one affects the others. In a panel in 1954 on the similarities and differences between psychoanalysis and dynamic psychotherapy, to Fromm-Reichmann's claim that anthropological research established the fact that the Oedipus complex was not universal, I pointed out that the method used, of interviews and direct