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by neuroscientific research and research on the non-verbal communication of infants, young children, and their parents, for example, by Beatrice Beebe and Frank M. Lachmann (2002). Ilany Kogan (2002), an Israeli analyst who is a prominent member of the US based Yale Trauma Research Team, has explored enactment in the children of Holocaust survivors. She defines the term as “the compulsion to re-create their parents’ experiences in their own lives through concrete acts.” (2002, p. 251). This is an important clinical demonstration that shows precisely how emotional narratives in inner life can be hidden from awareness. Involved are the intergenerational transmission of trauma, Freud’s theory of interpersonal unconscious communication, and – though she does not mention it – Hans Loewald’s (1975) idea that analysis is like the mimesis of dramatic art – in this case tragedy. Kogan differentiates her use of ‘enactment’ here from others by saying that, in contrast to Jacobs (1986) for example, she is not specifically focused on the interactive immediacy between patient and analyst. Her concept is more like an amalgam of Freud’s acting out and acting in, and Sandler’s (1978) and Eshel’s (1998) actualization. She employs the term in conjunction with “a black hole” (p. 255), a gap in conscious information at the center of the psyche that is nevertheless not empty (see Auerhahn and Laub’s (1998) holocaustal “empty circle” and others on severe trauma). Loewald (1975) speaks of a psychic absence as inherent in enactment, one that is discoverable in analysis, furthering patient differentiation, growth and autonomy. In this Kogan is akin to Loewald. Kogan illustrates her thinking with clinical examples, such as the following: A woman, anorexic in her youth (an enactment of parental starvation), whose father had concealed the existence of a first wife and child who were lost in the Shoah, married a man at age thirty-one who had abandoned his wife and child. Though she had no idea of this, her marrying this man was an enactment of her father’s situation. While in analysis, she unintentionally deserted a precious kitten for a day, which died, left in an overheated bathroom. Later she herself went to sleep in a bedroom with leaking gas. She had no conscious knowledge of her father’s experiences at the time. It took work with the transference to detect the various unconscious identifications with victim and victimizer and the different kinds of self-punishments at work in her. Eventually, the family narrative could be spoken. IV. C. European Developments and Clinical Relevance European analysts use the term enactment and related terms as countertransference and acting-out when they deal with the clinical phenomena implied in the concept. They generally confine themselves specifically to the analytic situation. In fact, many European analysts talk of acting-out or enactment to refer to the same clinical fact, using the two words as synonyms. However, for some analysts, enactment can be considered as a development of acting-out, originating in Freud’s term Agieren (Paz, 2007). Nevertheless, there are other analysts who, although distinguishing between them, consider that they can coexist in the clinical field, provided they occur at different moments in the analytic process (Ponsi, 2013). According to Sapisochin, enactments of the analytic couple are
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