Comments

This panel was notable, I believe, less for what it contributed to our understanding of enactments than for what it said about the remarkable changes that have taken place in American psychoanalysis over the past fifteen years.

Although expressing sharp differences over both the differing definitions and the place of enactments in analysis, the panelists shared a view of the analytic process that underlines how far we have come from the idea of analysis as a one-person psychology and the role of the analyst as essentially that of decoder and interpreter of the patient's conflicts.

Contained in this panel report is a view of analysis that is quite different; one that sees the analyst as an active participant in the process and someone who affects, and is affected by, all that happens in the hour. From this perspective, the interplay of minds that takes place in analysis, an interaction that inevitably leads to enactments on both sides of the couch, provides a fresh opportunity for understanding the way in which the patient's inner world manifests itself in action as well as through speech.

What is illustrated in this panel report, in other words, is an attitude and approach to the analytic experience that is captured by Rothstein's apt phrase, “the widening scope of the psychoanalyst.” This attitude is characterized by a greater interest in the intersubjective dimension of analysis, in the multiple channels of communication between patient and analyst, in the subtleties of transference-countertransference interactions, and, especially, in the ways in which nonverbal behaviors,