ABSTRACT
As background to my discussion of Michal Talby-Abarbanel's rich and evocative case presentation, I will present and expand on the contemporary Freudian concept of enactment. The term was introduced into the psychoanalytic lexicon by Ted Jacobs (1986) over two decades ago and continues to generate a large, productive literature on the subject (e.g., Chused, 1991; Jacobs, 1991b, 1993a, 1994, 1997, 2001b; Johan, 1992; McLaughlin, 1987, 1991, 1993; Renik, 1993; Roughton, 1993; Smith, 1993a, 1993b, 1997). More recently, I introduced the concept of the “enacted dimension of analytic process” (Katz, 1998, 2002). As I will now further explicate, I prefer thinking in terms of a dimension of experience, because the word “enactment” has the connotation of a discrete, behavioural event, whereas the essence of what needs to be conceptualized is a dynamically evolving, unconscious process.
