The Untelling

ABSTRACT

This paper builds on the idea that enactment is a form of narration in action. Drawing on Scarfone’s concept of the “unpast” I describe mutual enactment as an “untelling” that narrates that which has been locked in endless repetition. The untelling is also an un-telling, an undoing of prior translations, a “dissolution” of ways of being and an attempt to find the breakdown that is always feared. Following Laplanche, I distinguish between “filled-in enactment,” available to be understood and known, and “hollowed-out enactment” that opens a world of the unknowable, archaic sexual, within analyst and patient. Only when the hollow of the patient meets the hollow of the analyst can the work of re-translation and the instantiation of time and the past take hold. I offer a detailed description of my work with a patient to illustrate these different modes of enactment and the construction of the past and subjectivity.

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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.