A COMMENT ON Ivey's "ENACTMENT CONTROVERSIES"

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    • A COMMENT ON Ivey's "ENACTMENT CONTROVERSIES"
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    • Gavin Ivey’s précis:
    • “This critical review of the current disputes concerning counter-transference enactment systematically outlines the various issues and the perspectives adopted by the relevant psychoanalytic authors. In the light of this the ‘common ground’ hypothesis concerning the unifying influence of contemporary Counter-transference theory is challenged. While the existence of enactments, minimally defined as
    • the analyst's inadvertent actualization of the patient's transference fantasies, is widely accepted, controversies regarding the specific scope, nature, prevalence, relationship to countertransference experience, impact on the analytic process, role played by the analyst's subjectivity, and the correct handling of enactments abound. Rather than taking a stand based on ideological allegiance to any
    • particular psychoanalytic school or philosophical position, the author argues that the relative merits of contending perspectives is best evaluated with reference to close process scrutiny of the context, manifestation and impact of specific enactments on patients’ intrapsychic functioning and the analytic relationship. A detailed account of an interpretative enactment provides a context for the author's position on these debates.” Gavin Ivey’s
      
    
    
    • By definition, the analytic position  is of itself an enactment!, n’est pas?... which during the course of time will elicit responses, that will elicit counter-responses, Thus, the discipline’s original sin! The ancient position of the patient as scientific object; that is,  arrogance.
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    • The patient is made responsible to introducing –  I love the word – an “introject” into the analyst, and the analyst’s, it so appears, wish is to be immune, or is supposed to be immune to such intrusions. - But what if the analytic relationships, the way it is conducted,  by definition of its abnormalcy (quiet analyst for analyzands to start listening to what pours out of them; asymmetrical educationally;  if on the couch in a regressive position,  the analyst supposedly empathically sinking with him, etc) assures such enactments? That is, that there may be a fundamental flaw in the analytic attitude if  as intense a relationship as a flourishing analytic one is subjected to it ? That there is something fundamentally inhuman and arrogant (though arrogance itself of course is the most human? Find me an arrogant animal???) in treating the patient as scientific object. By definition, arrogance and its wages ruins relationships, of all kinds.  
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    • Behind the controversy seems to reside the analytic communities' wish to remain in control and the fear of a/ the real that exists in as intense a relationship as a flourishing analytic one – where analyst and analysand when going is good can grunt to each other like comfy pigs in their sty.   
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    • Many of the questions raised – the good or bad of enactments - are on the "make work" order, are strictly situational or contextual, and thus  inaccessible to theory.
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    • For a great example of an enactment that an in many ways superb analyst brought on himself with the arrogance of thinking that he could lie about not knowing German, to someone who was as proficient in both English and German as I, also as a poetic translator, I link to
    • http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/2009/07/trapping-trapper-crucial-event-from.html
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  • What his eneactment proved to me, ultimately, was our extraordinary closeness, which he wasted!
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    After joining SPSI through the sponsorship of David Spain in the mid-90s, I made pleasant acquaintance with Dr. George “Mike” Allison, who, however, shied away from discussing the TRAPPER piece. Not so the analyst I am closest to here, name-coz Leland Roloff, who heads the Jungian crew, who pointed out that not only was the intention of this dream for the analyst to divulge that in fact he did know German, but that the dream also expressed the longing for a protective instead of a hurtful father. I then could not agree more although I had been entirely unaware of that of the dream’s dimensions.
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    The dream was dreamt during a repeat of an abandonment experience of age 9 month, matters were stormy, the analyst had withdrawn into a position of saying that he could no longer discern what was going on through the storm clouds (i.e. would/ could no longer “hold” me, something that elicited a gritty resolve response in me), I was feverish, I was demylenating, losing weight.
    
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    The poem itself had been learned with a dozen other Goethe poems appr. 25 years prior during senior year in college from and for a good father figure, the Goethe professor Harry Pfund, a class that was conducted at his home over coffee and cake! (If you had asked me in the early 80s whether I remembered any of these poems I would have definitely said no, as I say now. Heirlooms in the memory vaults that awaken! I probably knew the Fischer-Diskau setting from even earlier. The landscape of the poem, the willow trees were was that of my childhood.)
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    - I only write symbolically! And that is all I want to suggest as to the improvement of Central Europe. Disclosure comes gradually or quickly. Perhaps some relationships want to remain entirely impersonal, so be it. I happen to prefer warmth, probably because of that aboriginal trauma, although I was able to suffer through the Fram being crushed in pack ice. Saying that obviates at least one long essay!