It’s All Too Much: Excess, Enactment and Ending In Danielle Knafo’s “The Sexual Illusionist”

Abstract

Danielle Knafo’s “The Sexual Illusionist” is examined from the perspective of working unobtrusively with unsymbolized and unrepresented states in the register of enactment. Knafo’s paper offers a unique rendition of an extremely challenging treatment involving great intimacy, love, violation and rampant and provocative sexual fantasies. In this commentary I suggest that the treatment exemplifies the challenge of working in the realm of psychic excess, too muchness and chronic developmental failure. I suggest that much of the highly sexualized material can be best understood as attempts by the patient, Cain, to create a transformational object such that he can manage his immersion in excess and come into being as a subject. I suggest that the therapeutic action takes place in the realm of unsymbolized enactment where love and limit can grow and take hold. I congratulate Knafo on a moving and honest description of an extremely challenging case.

Keywords:

• excess
• enactment
• sexualization
• transference
• trauma.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert Grossmark

Robert Grossmark, PhD teaches and supervises at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis, The National Institute for the Psychotherapies Program in Adult Psychoanalysis and National Training Program, the Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society, and other psychoanalytic institutes and clinical psychology doctoral programs. He is author of The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning, and co-edited The One & The Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy and Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory.