My View on Enactment and Related Revisions: Discussion

I was pleased to have been asked to discuss this panel, particularly as such a discussion provides me with the opportunity to represent a view which has been more or less discarded and relegated to a defensive position. My contribution will be to revive and keep alive what has been referred to as the traditional view, which has been superseded almost entirely by “how we do things now.” Rothstein dates this global change, to which he subscribes, to fifteen years ago; I have dated this metamorphosis in theory and technique from the mid-sixties.

I am in a very different place from the general thrust of modern psychoanalytic revisionism, and hope I will be heard with an open mind as I speak from a lonely position. I have pointed out that what is still called the mainstream is no longer main. I do note, however, from the discussants following the panel (as well as doubts expressed by some of the panelists themselves), that a number of questioners have expressed confusion and concern over loss of analytic values (Dryer), some correction of what was quoted from the past (Bass), and a worry in the current changes about the blind leading the blind (Grand). In my opinion, these concerns have not been sufficiently engaged.

I place the present subject of enactment in parallel with a number of related issues, all of them under the umbrella of a common fallacy or cluster of fallacies kept in force by the cohesion and contagiousness of group life. Recent developments have seen a steady progression away from specificity, reality (both the psychic and material varieties), delineable repressed contents, circumscribed etiologic