Performative and enactive features of psychoanalytic witnessing: The transference as the scene of address

Abstract

This paper will attempt to broaden the conception of witnessing in analytic work with traumatized patients by extending the idea to incorporate the patient’s developing and varied capacity for witnessing, as well as a witnessing that occurs within the analytic relationship itself. Actions occuring as part of traumatic repetition are understood to represent memory phenomena and are distinguised from dissociated self‐state experience. These experiences are not therapeutically intended to be symbolized, but rather lived‐through with the analyst, thus transforming the patient’s own relation to the experience. I suggest that the scene in which this living‐through takes place is the transference–countertransference matrix, and that it is the analytic encounter that allows traumatic repetition to take on the quality of a communication, an address to another, rather than remain meaningless reproduction. A clinical vignette illustrates the turning of trauma’s imperative for witnessing into an address in the analytic encounter.

Key words:

• applied analysis
• enactment
• transference

1. By this I mean to imply that it is both analyst and patient who witness what is reproduced in the space of the therapeutic relationship as neither is solely accorded the role of witness to the other’s separate experience.

1. By this I mean to imply that it is both analyst and patient who witness what is reproduced in the space of the therapeutic relationship as neither is solely accorded the role of witness to the other’s separate experience.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the comments of Drs. Phillip Blumberg, Cathy Caruth, Patricia Clough, and Robert Grossmark on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. By this I mean to imply that it is both analyst and patient who witness what is reproduced in the space of the therapeutic relationship as neither is solely accorded the role of witness to the other’s separate experience.