What Remains Untold in the Untelling: A Commentary on Robert Grossmark’s “The Untelling”

ABSTRACT

Grossmark describes enactments as arising from the patient’s own unknown, unrepresented history, that remains unmarked by time or place – the patient’s “unpast”- to be delivered to the analyst in enactive “untellings.” This discussion extends the idea of mutual enactment suggesting that the analyst necessarily shapes and contributes to the enactment and might need to access and call forward their own unpast for transformation to occur. Using a vignette from the film Hiroshima mon amour, the necessity of introducing separation and distinction, not just companioning, is highlighted.

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Jade McGleughlin

Jade McGleughlin, L.I.C.S.W., is past president, personal and supervising analyst, board member and faculty member of The Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She is in private practice in Cambridge, MA, providing consultation, supervision, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis to children and adults. Her writing focuses on gender, the negative, the analysts’ necessary nonsovereignty, and uses of visual art to articulate problems in representation. Her forthcoming book Clinical Storytelling, Art and the Problems of Being: The Analyst’s Necessary Vertigo is being published by Routledge in Spring 2024. She is a portrait painter.