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Ellman and Moskowitz's collection of papers on enactment explores the evolution of psychoanalytic understandings of non-verbal behaviours in the patient/analyst encounter, and considers whether such behaviours can be therapeutic. In the process we follow a rich and coherent path of case material, theoretical explication, and disclosure of the analyst's therapeutic endeavours.
The central theme, which questions the relationship between action and psychoanalysis, is charted along a time line against which the emergence and development of concepts such as acting out, repetition phenomena, counter-transference, projective identification, transference actualisation, and contemporary ideas of enactment are taken up and positioned by the individual contributors.
It is now more than a decade since some of these ideas about the nature of enactment and its place in the therapeutic relationship were making their way onto the analytic stage, out of an essentially Classical Freudian position . This position is reflected in the choice of authors for this collection, which, with the exception of Joseph Sandler, represents an entirely American picture. So with this passage of time, my experience is less one of coming upon something new, but rather to wonder how these ideas are working their way into the practices of analysts at large, as well as to think about how they can be helpful to those who consult and intervene in the organisational and social arena.
With psychoanalysis envisaged by Freud as a ‘talking cure’, we see how the central therapeutic ingredient, that of recovering pathogenic memory, privileges thought and speech. Other non-verbal behaviours in the patient and analyst were seen as actions which for the patient were ‘robbing him of the possibility of a fuller possession of his capacity for expression’ (Greenacre, 1950). Even the transference was