Enactment: Listening to psychic gestures^*

* Translated by Philip Slotkin MA Cantab.

ABSTRACT

The growing acceptance since the turn of the millennium of a psyche open to exchanges with others from the earliest stages of life has prompted the conception of clinical approaches for listening psychoanalytically to the effects of this archaic link on the mind. On the basis of clinical material, the author advocates analytic listening through the medium of enactment, which he sees as a conceptual tool to facilitate psychoanalytic understanding of what is dramatized by the analytic couple, over and above the semantic content of the patient’s words. In addition to the dyad of free association and evenly suspended attention for gaining access to the dynamically repressed, the author contends that listening through the medium of enactment is the royal road to what he calls the psychic gesture. This is a form of image-based psychic registration of the early interaction with objects that preserved the infantile subject from primal representational helplessness. The author argues that what is enacted by the analytic couple is an irreducible intermediate stage in any analytic process, since it enables the patient to gain insight into the intersubjective genesis of his psyche and to take ownership of his destiny.

KEYWORDS:

• enactment
• countertransference
• psychic gestures
• listening
• trauma
• technique
• symbolization
• non-verbal registers

Notes

* Translated by Philip Slotkin MA Cantab.

1 [Translator’s note: For convenience, the masculine form is used for both sexes throughout this translation.]

2 Since Freud, every individual has been held to live through a period “during which he is helpless and has to be looked after and during which his pressing needs are satisfied by an external agency and are thus prevented from becoming greater … ” (1915a, 134n2). My a posteriori rereading of this notion of helplessness within an epigenetic model of early representational development is based on the activation by the other of innate dispositions to register emotion in growing degrees of symbolization of experience (Sapisochin 2011, 2012). By means of the projective attribution of modes of conferring meaning on emotional encounters, the other activates in the infantile subject this potential capacity to generate meaning autonomously, without which the infans would remain helpless—that is, lacking the tools for so doing. However, in my view this other enjoys a paradoxical status in the psyche, because, while assisting the subject cognitively, it “heteronomizes” him (Castoriadis 1975; Sapisochin 1999a, 1999b, 2008).

3 This self-reflective capability through identification with a character who observes the link between two subjects—a capability that is a precondition of insight—has been called the third position by Britton (1989). This relates to an intermediate term between the subject and the experience of himself interacting with others, where the space for the possibility of self-observation is created. In the analytic situation, this is the space in which the analyst’s interpretations are generated. Chasseguet-Smirgel (1991) suggested that this idea was the fruit of fertile exchanges between analysts on either side of the English Channel, so that Britton was inspired by the French concept of the tiers, itself based on Lacan’s “name-of-the-father.”

4 My usual technical position, centring on the transformation of what I hear into images, is my way of practising evenly suspended attention. Here I differ from Botella and Botella (2001, 69), whose model of psychoanalytic listening deems this transformation into images, which they call the work of figurability, to be an extraordinary accident of verbal thinking on the analyst’s part that involves a departure from his evenly suspended attention.

5 I use the word “explicit” because the analyst’s position during the enactment is disclosed implicitly in any interpretive feedback on this event.

6 The transference–countertransference situation is here considered as the repetition of the relationship with an object from the patient’s psychic reality that bears the stamp of the early interaction with the others who structured the infantile subject. I take a more complex view of the contemporary theory of technique than the binary conception in which psychic reality is held to be either shaped solipsistically or isomorphic with external reality. An example of this conception can be found in Blass (2018, 948), who imputes the following opinion to Melanie Klein: “if the analyst can’t bear the negative transference he may opt to rely on environmental theories … instead of remaining focused on encountering psychic reality. Turning to environmental theories allows a shift of the patient’s attack from the analyst to external figures, with the analyst remaining a good object.”

7 [Translator’s note: The Spanish word imaginario used in the original manuscript literally means “imaginary,” but “image-based” seems to convey the sense more accurately.]

8 Note that, while the topographical model of Freud’s metapsychology includes the idea that thing-presentations are essentially visual in nature, they differ from what I am suggesting in that they are unknowable representations. On the contrary, I postulate that enactment facilitates knowledge of the type of image-based registrations that I call psychic gestures.

9 It will be recalled that Freud’s metapsychological theory of repression postulates unbinding of representations from their quantum of affect. The unconscious of the topographical model thus becomes the container of Freud’s Vorstellung, which cannot take account of the stigmas left behind in the psyche by the other because it is seen as generated intrasubjectively, by way of the progressive transformation of “indications of perception” (Freud 1896, 234) into thing-presentations and ultimately word-presentations. Furthermore, Freud’s Vorstellung is more static in nature than my model of sequences of psychic gestures, which is a development of the theory of internal object relations (Sapisochin 2016a).

10 Interestingly, the German word Prägung is also used in Konrad Lorenz’s ethological theory to denote the concept known in English as imprinting—a concept reintroduced to psychoanalysis with Bowlby’s notion of attachment.

11 [Translator’s note: The German word Sprache used by Freud can be rendered as either “speech” or “language” in English.]

12 On the basis of very different models, Bucci (1985, 1997) and Roussillon (2015) also postulate the existence of cognitive registrations due to presence, but they do not to my knowledge see enactment as a tool for listening to them in an analytic process.

13 A colleague wondered whether my concept of psychic gestures was equivalent to Kleinian unconscious phantasy. Both are in my view similar in being non-verbal registrations of emotion. However, their genesis differs in the two cases: it is intersubjective in the case of psychic gestures and internal and drive-related in that of Kleinian phantasy. A fundamental difference concerns the specificity of expression through the enacted in a psychic gesture.

14 However, the opposite is also sometimes found to be the case, where analysts with an explicit theory of the psyche developed out of intrasubjectivity work clinically with an implicit relational theory.