ABSTRACT
Current Freudian writing about the concept of 'enactment' has led some classical analysts to a new way of conceptualizing the place of countertransference in psychoanalysis and, even more significantly, the basic nature of the psychoanalytic relationship. Harry Stack Sullivan's (e.g., 1953) most significant contribution to clinical psychoanalysis is taken from Heisenberg's physics and from social psychologist's field theory: the observer, by definition, interacts with and influences what is observed. The concept of countertransference and the extent of inevitable psychoanalytic interaction has evolved from Sullivan's cautious beginnings and his contradictory, positivist bent: his view of the analyst as 'expert' in the observation of extratransference interpersonal relations. The inevitability of the analyst's unwitting participation transforms a traditional model of analytic objectivity into a more muddied world of relativism and perspectivism. The American Psychoanalytic Association panel (1992) on the concept of 'enactment' defines the term as an actualization of the transference.
