On the Intersubjective Creation of Time and the Importance of Enactment: A Response to Chefetz and Bartlett

ABSTRACT

In this discussion of Dr. Chefetz’s and Dr. Bartlett’s responses (this issue, 2022), we further explore the inevitability of enactment in the process of treating dissociation in the face of relational trauma. Trauma, we propose, attacks human subjectivity by rapturing its being-in-time. Instead of being the creator of time, the subject finds himself doomed to be the object of time and living in the perpetuation of repetition compulsion. Paradoxically, it is only through repetition that one can break this time-loop and begin to feel and change his or her traumatic past. In the act of repetition, one subjugates the other (and reality as a whole) to his own frozen dissociations, yet with that very act also invites the other into his frozen experiences. When the other “accepts” the invitation, i.e., “answers” with an invitation of his or her own, an intersubjective encounter of frozen repetitions – a “dissociative third” - is created, which enables one to reclaim his or her own lost experiences and re-create his sense of time.

This article responds to:

How Do We Stay Awake? Discussion of Daniel Levy and Boaz Shalgi’s “Imagination and Fantasy: The Dialectic Nature of the Encounter with Trauma and Dissociation

The Quest to Understand and Resolve Persistent Dissociative Processes: A Discussion of Levy and Shalgi, “Imagination and Fantasy: The Dialectic Nature of the Encounter with Trauma and Dissociation”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Stolorow, Atwood and Brandchaft (1992) outline what they call: “three realms of unconscious”: the dynamic unconscious, the pre-reflective unconscious and the unvalidated unconscious,which is the closer to the kind or unconscious which is the result of relational trauma.

² For a detailed exploration of Bergson’s concept of intuition as the method which enables becoming/duration, see: Anderson (2015): Bergsonian intuition: A metaphysics of mystical life. Philosophical Topics, 43: 239–251.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Levy

Daniel Levy, M.D., is a psychiatrist, teacher and supervisor at the Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Program, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University.

Boaz Shalgi

Boaz Shalgi, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist, head of the doctoral program: “Psychoanalysis and its Interfaces,” teacher, and supervisor, the Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Program, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. He is the Editor in Chief, “Sihot - Dialogues”: Israel Journal of Psychotherapy.