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the split-off parts to be re-signified, allowing them once again to be part of the emotional world. It is interesting to note the similarity between the Barangers’ description and what is named chronic enactment. Enactment refers to behaviors that take place in the analytic field as the result of mutual emotional induction. Consequently, it involves both members of the analytic dyad. C hronic enactment is expressed through behavior whereby an obstructive collusion is formed with neither patient nor analyst being aware of what is happening. The analytic process becomes paralyzed in certain areas. Such conduct and behavior refer back to situations where verbal symbolization was weakened. When words exist, they serve as instruments for discharging or forms for expressing affects that involve the listener emotionally. In consequence, chronic enactment can be viewed as a kind of bastion . But, by definition, chronic enactments are not perceived by the dyad. Chronic enactment is also a consequence of the need for initial linking mechanisms to be revived in the analytic field. Sometimes, in this revival, the patient receives the analyst’s alpha-function, even if this happens unconsciously. It is gradually introjected, which also happens unconsciously. When it becomes sufficient, the symbiotic chronic enactment can be suddenly undone (disolved) as an acute enactment, that involve discharges in the analytic field including the possibility to destroy the process . This rupture manifests itself as abrupt behaviours that impose upon the analyst’s observation due to their intensity. Only then does the analyst realize what had occurred during the previous chronic enactment . This retroactive re-signifying corresponds to the Freudian idea of Nachträglichkeit , deferred action, or après coup (Freud, 1918). In sequence the analyst perceives that acute enactment includes not only discharges of non-dreams but also non-dreams being dreamed. This way, it is shown that, at least in borderline configurations, there may be a need for an initial more or less chronic enactment or collusion to take place, which may go unnoticed. In this phase, the analyst and the patient ‘are preparing’ themselves unconsciously to face up to the triangularity. When this is possible, a change in the nature of the enactment occurs, which tries to communicate vigorously, in an intense way, what was hidden from the analyst, who will now be able to free himself from the collusion. Perhaps this is a part of the ‘natural history’ of the analytical process with narcissistic and borderline patients: a symbiotic phase (in which unconscious changes also occur, masked by the collusion), which needs time to be worked through, gradually creating the possibility for it to be ‘broken’. This sudden ‘break-up’ (acute enactment) is a sign that the process of working through has now arrived at a point at which it is possible to run the risk of realizing that the analyst is a third party, an independent being, no longer a narcissistic extension of the patient. Thus, in the analytical process, the earliest phases of an individual’s development are relived, with the possibility that new experiences may substitute archaic negative parental and environmental experiences in order to reach an oedipal situation that can be worked through. In this context, acute enactments are conglomerates that include discharges, non- dreams being dreamed and dreams regressing to non-dreams. They indicate ruptures in former situations of earliest development. For the analytic work to fruitfully proceed, the analyst must identify and give meaning to the facts that had occurred long ago, to include them into the symbolic thinking. (See also entry ENACTMENT)
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