Response to the Commentaries of Dominique Scarfone and Jade McGleughlin on “The Untelling”

ABSTRACT

With much gratitude to Jade McGleughlin and Dominique Scarfone I take up their comments on “The Untelling.” I address remembering versus repeating and suggest that this dichotomy excludes the creative and transformational qualities of the untelling and diminishes the eloquence of action in psychoanalysis. I take issue with an idea of meaningless enactments and argue that there is always meaning emerging in the realm of the untelling. I clarify that the ontological turn does not demote meaning but tilts into a different register of meaning and argue that Laplanche de-emphasized the affective and painful aspects of psychoanalytic process. I agree with the necessity of the analyst’s inner work as essential to psychoanalytic transformation and suggest that containment involves exactly that level of processing. I suggest that the focus on re-living of trauma and doer/done to dynamics are iterations of filled-in enactments and can obscure the potential for transformation in the dimension of the hollowed out. I endorse the dimension of happening as transformational in psychoanalysis

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Robert Grossmark

Robert Grossmark, Ph.D., A.B.P.P., is a psychoanalyst in New York City. He works with individuals, groups and couples. He is on the teaching and supervising faculty at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, The National Institute for the Psychotherapies Program in Adult Psychoanalysis, The National Training Program in Psychoanalysis, National Faculty Member, the Florida Psychoanalytic Center and lectures at other psychoanalytic institutes and clinical psychology training programs nationally and internationally. He is an Associate Editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues. He is the author of The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning and co-edited The One and the Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy and Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory.