The Flow of Enactive Engagement: Commentary on Matt Aibel’s “Being Railroaded: A Candidate’s Struggle to Stay on Track”

Abstract

I take up Matt Aibel’s dilemma of how to explore a patient’s inner world and the intersubjective experience of the treatment when the patient is not willing to engage in this or take anything from the analyst. I suggest that Matt serves his patient well by allowing himself to be drawn into the patient’s world on the patient’s terms. I focus on the emergence of a dead aliveness that Matt comes to fruitfully live with the patient. I suggest a process of enacted mutual regression and propose that a process of the flow of enacted engagement functions as an interpersonal version of free association that involves both patient and analyst in the field of treatment. I address the false binary of an active vs. holding/containing position for the analyst, and suggest that the latter can involve a very active engagement with the patient.

Keywords:

• flow of enactive engagement
• dead aliveness
• enactment
• analyst in transition
• trauma
• mutual regression

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Grossmark

Robert Grossmark, PhD, teaches and supervises at the Adult Training Program in Psychoanalysis and the National Training Program at NIP; he supervises at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and the doctoral program in clinical psychology at the City University of New York, and teaches at the Eastern Group Psychotherapy Training Program. He has published psychoanalytic articles that integrate contemporary Relational ideas with object relations, contemporary Freudian, and other perspectives. He is the co-editor of Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory and The One and The Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy, both published by Routledge.