ABSTRACT
Karen Maroda speaks to the inevitability of enactment and its therapeutic potential, with an emphasis on how ubiquitous it is and on how equally inevitable is the evocation of the analyst's past in terms of re-creating an emotional scenario. This chapter focuses both on the theoretical issues of enactment, the analyst's fiduciary responsibility to facilitate conflict rather than waiting for it to happen, and on often unspoken conflicts that may go unrecognized for a variety of reasons, particularly the analyst's defense against being the "bad enough mother". The burgeoning of the two-person literature occurred in the 1980s, and the term "enactment" was coined by analyst Theodore Jacobs in 1986. The very foundation of psychoanalysis is that unconscious feelings and thoughts can be brought into awareness and expressed, creating the necessary conditions for working through. There are numerous obstacles to therapists becoming less conflict-avoidant and more skilled at actually facilitating both conscious conflicts that can be observed, and the aforementioned out-of-awareness enactments.
