![Sample our Behavioral Sciences journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110801/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Behavioral-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Robert Grossmark's “The Untelling” is an original contribution to the understanding of the psychoanalytic process, especially with the introduction of the notions of Untelling and of Filled-in and Hollowed-out enactments. This comment aims at favoring further exchanges with Grossmark, especially on the problem of meaning in relation to enactment and the importance of the time dimension in the changes that psychoanalysis can bring about. It is, namely, a matter of creating the category of the past. The metaphor of a scrapyard and the dangerous sharp objects it contains is used in relation to the clinical case. The metaphor illustrates how what is brought back through enactment into the analytic process does not carry in itself a fixed meaning, but can be given a workable meaning through handling the transference while ensuring both the reliability of the analytic frame and the analyst’s own passibility.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dominique Scarfone
Dominique Scarfone, M.D., member emeritus of the Société psychanalytique de Montréal (Canadian Psychoanalytic Society) and Honorary professor, Université de Montréal. He retired from practice in 2021. His most recent book is The reality of the Message. Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche. (New York : The Unconscious in Translation, 2023).