Narrating the Unsayable: Enactment, Repair, and Creative Multiplicity in Group Psychotherapy

ABSTRACT

This article introduces an approach to group analysis that places dissociation of traumatic experience at the center of group interaction. Healing in group is regarded as hinging on the enactment of unformulated and dissociated experience and affect. Enactments are regarded as involving the members of the group, the group as a whole, and the group analyst. Clinical examples are offered to illustrate the enactment of dissociated trauma that was unable to be suffered earlier and the enactment of absence and neglect that is non-represented. In this hermeneutic conception, the group comes to narrate what has happened but never been experienced, and healing accrues through the group’s witnessing and making affectively real what was hitherto unsayable and unthinkable. The group analyst uses and shares his or her own experience to facilitate this process.

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Notes on contributors

Robert Grossmark

Robert Grossmark is a psychoanalyst in a private practice in New York City.