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was the first such discovery (the Dora case), where the fantasy structure of the patient is projected onto the analyst. Though first described in his self-analysis in 1899 (“The Interpretation of Dreams” ) , in 1910 Freud gave the oedipus complex greater prominence, showing how children related sexually to their parents in patterns that they repeated in adult life, now with the analyst as parental substitute. Countertransference (1910) followed, referring to “the patient’s influence on his unconscious feelings” (1910, p.144). Acting out was next (1914) (though Freud had mentioned it earlier, seeing Dora’s premature termination as revenge on Freud, a substitute object for the punishing feelings that she felt towards Herr K). A further underpinning of the contemporary term ‘enactment’ came with his appreciation of the importance of the repetition compulsion (1914). This concept described how traumata unconsciously became repeated in treatment and in life. Freud wrote, “He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it… he cannot escape from this compulsion to repeat; and in the end we understand that this is his way of remembering…” (1914, p.150) In 1923, the development of the structural theory led to a focus on the defense mechanisms and their relation to the ego. Defenses that would become central to the concept of enactment were projection, introjection, and re-projection. In sum, the current concepts of enactment embody, though of course also go beyond, many Freudian concepts.
III. DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT
The verb to enact is allied to the verb to act and one of the meanings of to act is to play a dramatic or theatrical role. The term to enact , together with its corresponding noun enactment , is found, imprecisely, in early and contemporary psychoanalytical literature, and refers to dramatic externalizations of the patient’s internal world either in a session or in everyday life. The term re-enactment has the same meaning. In his seminal paper “On Countertransference Enactments”, Jacobs (1986) describes enactments as situations where an analyst is surprised by his own apparently inadequate countertransferential behavior. Later, the analyst may perceive the connections among his behavior, the emotional induction of the patient and personal factors of his own. Jacobs (1991, 2001) further clarified, emphasized, and popularized the term ‘enactment’. He used the term as the name for a specific occurrence in analysis in which one participant’s psychology is played out vis-à-vis the other. What he tried to convey was the idea that enactments are behaviors on the part of patient, analyst, or both, that arise as a response to conflicts and fantasies stirred up in each by the ongoing therapeutic work . While linked to the interplay of transference and countertransference, these behaviors are also connected via memory to associated thoughts, unconscious fantasies and experiences of infancy and childhood. Thus, for Jacobs, the idea of enactment contains within it the notion of reenactment , that is, the reliving of bits and pieces
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