Play, Free Association, and Enactment

An earlier, shorter version of this paper was presented as the Levy-Goldfarb Lecture of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research on March 3, 2020 at the Columbia Faculty House in New York City.

Eugene Mahon is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He is the author of three books: A Psychoanalytic Odyssey; Rensal The Redbit; Boneshop of the Heart, and many other psychoanalytic publications. He has a private practice in New York City.

Abstract

In this article I define childhood symbolic play, free association, and enactments as distinct entities despite the important strands of connective tissue that bind them psychologically. To Freud’s definition of play being the same as fantasy, except for play’s need to use props and playthings to actualize itself, I add action as an obvious but yet nevertheless neglected component of childhood symbolic play. I suggest that the potential for free association begins with the achievement of formal Piagetian cognitive processes in early adolescence, an achievement that needs no props or actions to set it in motion since words and ideas generate further spontaneities in a creative flow of associations. In adult psychoanalytic process, I define enactment, not only in the modern sense of a shared unconscious communication that illustrates the complementarity of countertransference/transference mutuality, but as if enactment could be isolated from its enmeshment in the countertransference/transference milieu of analytic process and viewed momentarily as a transference entity exclusively. I take this point of view to emphasize longitudinally, an individual’s action in a developmental sequence, an imaginary developmental line from the six stages of sensorimotor actions that lead to symbolism, to thought as trial action, leading on then to symbolic play and to free association in adolescence, free associative communication being the essential core of analytic process despite the ubiquity of enactments that accompany it. I illustrate this imagined developmental line, which leads from the earliest sensorimotor acts to the decisive non-neurotic acts that characterize individuated post-analytic maturity, with psychoanalytic process from childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

Keywords:

• Sensorimotor
• formal cognition
• developmental line
• play
• fantasy
• enactment

Notes

An earlier, shorter version of this paper was presented as the Levy-Goldfarb Lecture of the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research on March 3, 2020 at the Columbia Faculty House in New York City.

Eugene Mahon is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. He is the author of three books: A Psychoanalytic Odyssey; Rensal The Redbit; Boneshop of the Heart, and many other psychoanalytic publications. He has a private practice in New York City.