Vitalizing Enactment: A Relational Exploration

Abstract

Drawing from her extensive work with deeply disturbed children Alvarez (2012) theorized a form of intervention termed “vitalization” in which the analyst actively reaches out to contact and “reclaim” her most inaccessible patients, engaging them in the world of emotions and relationships. In this paper I consider Alvarez’s ideas through the lens of Relational thought, reconceptualizing vitalization as a unique form of enactment that can draw the analytic dyad from deadened impasse into enlivened contact. In vitalizing enactment embryonic affects, hopes, and longings find expression and are potentiated for patient and analyst alike. This is a view of enactment as a progressive and creative lived experience, rather than an unconscious collision to be survived and symbolized. I contextualize vitalizing enactment in relation to Alvarez’s original formulations as well as relevant contemporary theories and present a clinical vignette to illustrate this paper’s themes.

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Notes on contributors

Amy Schwartz Cooney

Amy Schwartz Cooney, Ph.D., is Faculty and Supervisor at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies, and the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity. She is in private practice in New York City.