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Whenever we write about psychoanalytic work we introduce an artifact. The work described can never convey the complexity of the work itself, even in the hands of so gifted a writer as Ted Jacobs.
In describing anything we make a selection. That selection in our writing may resemble the selections we make for observation and comment in the office, but the relationship between the two is never exact. Furthermore, in isolating any part of the work for observation and description we freeze it, reify it, and give it a definition that may suggest the work is made up of a linear series of discrete entities, such as defenses, drive derivatives, or, for that matter, enactments, rather than forces and processes in motion. These entities are, in part, necessary artifacts of observation and description.
The entities we describe allow others to observe them in their work—or disagree with them and describe something different—but they also make our literature appear cleaner, tidier, and more surefooted than our observations in the office can ever be. And they identify certain writers with certain phenomena or types of interventions, Arlow (1991) with the interpretation of unconscious fantasy, for example; Schwaber (1986) with the observation of a patient's shifts in state; and Jacobs (1991) with the interplay of enactments. And so we are always left to wonder whether these are in fact the most prominent