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We are writing this Introduction to Issue 34:1: 2024 in November 2023, 7 weeks after Hamas’ horrifying attack on Israel and Israel’s devastating retaliation. Daily, we are bombarded with images of destruction and desperation, and a shared vision for peace and security feels both elusive and essential. This ongoing human rights catastrophe, saturated with intergenerational trauma, has fractured communities worldwide and within psychoanalysis; dialogue and recognition of the Other often feel impossible.
As human beings, analysts, and editors of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, we are reeling. But recognizing our fundamental interdependence, our responsibility to and need for one another, we are also endeavoring to generate conversation and hold complexity, creating space for reflection, trying to make the unbearable symbolizable and communicable.
In contemplating the mix of psychoanalytic ideas and experiences we have assembled In This Issue, we see that each panel reflects this effort to bear the unbearable, clinically, existentially, and socio-culturally. All of our authors, in one form or another, are wrestling with the unbearable, whether in the form of unrepresented experience, the necessity of engaging with mortality and death, or in aiding patients as they grapple with violent upheaval, exile, and loss. We invite you to think with us about this collection of papers, which are both thematically distinct and ineffably entwined.”
In “The Untelling,” Robert Grossmark offers a perspective on enactment as arising from the patient’s unrepresented history, a form of “narration in action” that is “unpast.” Any enactment entails mutual enactment, which becomes an “untelling,” a process where the patient and analyst give shape and narrative to the atemporal present, constructing a past and temporality that offers a path to new experience. Grossmark develops this novel perspective by describing an analytic treatment that illuminates and engages. In his discussion of Grossmark, Domin