The pressure toward enactment and the hatred of reality.

The pressure toward enactment is investigated in terms of the threats that primitive, pre-thinking states of mind exert on attempts to know and understand. Clinical material and a review of the literature suggest that when the analyst confronts (by thinking) rather than complies (by action) with the hidden demands of omnipotence, he or she triggers and is then subject to the pre-thinking mental realm of concrete sensory bombardment, which can penetrate and obliterate his or her separately thinking mind. One important pressure driving the analyst toward enactment derives from a defensive response aimed at avoiding the threat of such concrete projections.     

Sensory empathy and enactment1

The authors propose the concept of sensory empathy which emerges through contact between analyst and patient as they get in touch with an area concerning the primary bond. This area is not so much based on thoughts and fantasies as it is on physical sensations. Sensory empathy has to do with that instrument described by Freud as pertaining to the unconscious of any human, which enables one person to interpret unconscious communications of another person. The authors link this concept to that of enactment precisely because the latter concerns unconscious, early elements that fi nd in the act a fi rst meaningful expression. It involves both analyst and patient. In other words, the authors wish to emphasize the importance of the analytical process maintaining contact with that immense fi eld of human interaction that can be defi ned as primary sensory area and which becomes intertwined with the evolution of affects. Clinical examples are provided to clarify these hypotheses.     

Countertransference,enactment and sexual abuse

This paper examines the development of a therapeutic relationship with a sexually abused latency girl who, in the course of her two years of four times weekly psychotherapy, was placed in two different foster-homes. It is argued that the child's re-enactment of the abuse in the consulting room allowed her to move from a seductive relationship with the therapist to one characterized by basic trust. This was paralleled by her development of a capacity to think and to tolerate affect states. The use of an imaginary twin by the child and the use of powerful countertransference feelings in the therapist are seen as the main therapeutic tools in the treatment. The premature termination of the treatment – due to the therapist's departure – enabled the child to articulate for the first time her feelings, in the transference, about the trauma and the traumatizing agent. The child's progressing moves in the therapy are also presented.     

Clinical and theoretical aspects of enactment

Enactment as a concept can serve analytic discourse through its established meaning of an act intended strongly to influence, persuade, or force another to react. We might agree to use the term in two complementary ways: Broadly, enactment can designate all behaviors of both parties in the analytic relationship, even verbal, in consequence of the intensification of the action intent of our words created by the constraints and regressive push induced by the analytic rules and frame. Patient and analyst are vulnerable to falling back on behaviors that actualize their intentions, doing so in ways motivated by and reflecting transference hopes, fears, and compromises shaped in their developmental past. Specifically, enactment can then be defined as those regressive (defensive) interactions between the pair experienced by either as a consequence of the behavior of the other. While nominally an interpersonal perspective, this concept of enactment facilitates more balanced attention to the involvement of both parties and to the intrapsychic dynamics in both that specifically shape their interactions. A clinical vignette illustrates the analyst's contributions to enactment, especially those reflecting his reactivated conflicts and their relation to his theoretical and technical preferences.     

Learning from text benefits from enactment

Classical studies on enactment have highlighted the beneficial effects of gestures performed in the encoding phase on memory for words and sentences, for both adults and children. In the present investigation, we focused on the role of enactment for learning from scientific texts among primary-school children. We assumed that enactment would favor the construction of a mental model of the text, and we verified the derived predictions that gestures at the time of encoding would result in greater numbers of correct recollections and discourse-based inferences at recall, as compared to no gestures (Exp. 1), and in a bias to confound paraphrases of the original text with the verbatim text in a recognition test (Exp. 2). The predictions were confirmed; hence, we argue in favor of a theoretical framework that accounts for the beneficial effects of enactment on memory for texts.     

Spatial recall improved by retrieval enactment

Evidence from studies of intentional learning suggests that the accuracy of recall is not assisted by appropriate enactment at retrieval, as opposed to encoding. In the present study, long-term recall of spatial arrays following incidental learning (text messaging or calculator use) was tested under three different motor conditions at retrieval. For both letter and number arrays, the accuracy of recall was found to be improved by relevant enactment at the time of retrieval, relative to retrieval with no movement. In contrast, irrelevant movement was found to produce an impairment in accuracy. The overall accuracy of recalling a letter array was found to be a power-law function of the frequency of exposure to the array. The findings are discussed in terms of the hypothesis that appropriate movement during memory retrieval recruits egocentric representations that supplement allocentric representations subserving longer term spatial recall.     

On not interpreting: The metaphor of the baby,enactment, and transitional experience

Conclusion Winnicott suggests that transitional experiences after outliving their usefulness tend to fade into the background, leaving behind the capacity to develop further transitional experiences and symbolic thought. My understanding of this transitional experience remained uninterpreted as a form of joined action or play in the analysis. This complex set of actions and unverbalized meanings represented for me an aspect of the use of the metaphor of the baby and the allegory of the caretaking parent both in terms of the narrative structure and in the capacity to engage in a process of enacting the patient’s dissociated experiences and facilitating the development of his symbolic experiences of greed and aggression through the development of a playful transitional experience. I believe that it was the patient’s concrete experience of greed and aggression that was at the core of the patient’s arrested development in his capacity to be a sexual and loving adult and to develop an intimate relationship with another person. I believe that the evolving transitional experience of eating the donut and later the cookie enabled us to enact and play out the multiple meanings of greed, envy, the destruction of the object, and finally the reparation and recreation of the object. In the paradox created through the transitional experience I could be both greedy and trustworthy and he could be both sadistic and generous. In the beginning of this paper I suggested a series of dichotomies that define differences in contemporary approaches to psychoanalysis. In the developmental arrest position that I developed in this paper the treatment parameters emphasize mutuality, symmetry, constructivism, the political and social dimensions of experience, and most importantly the analyst’s countertransference participation is thought of as strategic, critical, and voluntary. Psychoanalysis has traditionally been thought of as involving multiple levels of experience, some conscious and verbal and some unconscious and experiential or acted out. The concepts of play, enactment, and transitional experience presented in this paper bring to the fore a mode of psychoanalytic related ness that is experiential and conscious, although not objectively or verbally interpreted, which I believe is necessary as a means of developing the capacity for symbolic thought. Presented to the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, October 19, 1995.     

The role of enactment in prospective remembering

This study investigated, in a laboratory setting, whether prospective memory (remembering to perform intended actions in the future) would be improved by self-enactment of the to-be-remembered tasks. The subjects, 45 university students, were asked to remember later to perform five tasks that they initially enacted themselves, watched the experimenter perform, or had described to them. These tasks were to be performed, ostensibly in preparation for the next subject, at the end of 30 min of filler activity, which was presented as the experimental task. Surprisingly, self-enactment produced the poorest prospective remembering. Speculative explanations are offered in terms of both metacognitive expectations about memory and output-monitoring deficiencies.     

The effect of enactment on memory for order

The effect of enactment on memory for serial order was investigated in two experiments. In both experiments a reconstruction task was used to separate order from item information. In Experiment 1 enactment and test information was manipulated between groups. For subjects who had not been informed about the reconstruction test, performance of verbal and motor groups was similar with regard to both serial-position curves and overall performance. For subjects who knew beforehand that they would be tested for memory of the order of the action events, performance in the verbal condition was significantly better than in the motor condition. In Experiment 2, the reversed enactment effect for test-informed subjects was replicated with a within-subjects design. The results agree with Engelkamp and Zimmer's (1984, 1994) position that enactment serves exclusively to enhance item information, and indicate that subjects have less control over the encoding processes when they are enacting than during verbal encoding (cf. Cohen, 1981).     

Going home: migration as enactment and symbol

Abstract :  The concepts of home and migration are briefly explored. Reference is made to the reflections of several writers on migration suggesting that migrants may experience alienation, even permanent melancholia. There is discussion of the need to mourn what has been lost and left behind, and of the challenge in analytic work with a migrant to relate to the pain of the individual's core self amid environmental and cultural losses. The paper outlines the history of an individual before her migration from Latin America to London, and tendency to idealize as a new arrival. The symbolization process is discussed and it is suggested that repetitive enactment in the analytic transference may have been needed for her internal reality of estrangement to be confirmed and differentiated from her culturally and socially isolated external life as a migrant. Only then could she mourn losses and symbolize her inner reality. It is suggested that through mourning and symbolization the significance of migration for the patient was worked with and transformed so that, following a second migration, an ordinary, good enough home could be made in a new place.     

Verb frequency and enactment in implicit and explicit memory

In this article we report on two experiments concerning the effects of verb frequency and enactment on explicit- and implicit-memory tests. The results showed that verb frequency and enactment had additive effects on (explicit) recognition. Moreover, an (implicit) verb-identification test showed that prior enactment had absolutely no influence on this test, while verb frequency had a clear-cut effect. These results speak in favor of the assumption that verb-frequency and enactment effects are based on different types of information. It is further assumed that the verb-frequency effect is a lexical effect, whereas the enactment effect is not.     

Improved episodic integration through enactment: implications for aging

Enactment may improve memory for verb phrases by facilitating episodic integration of object-action components into a unitized whole. It is unclear, however, whether the influence of enactment on episodic integration is related to or independent of the strength of the preexisting semantic relationship between components. To address this issue, the authors examined the influence of enactment on memory for lists of semantically related object-action phrases ("Put money in the wallet") and semantically unrelated phrases created by repairing these objects and actions to make phrases that were unusual but still were possible to perform ("String a thread through the wallet," "Put money in the napkin"). As such, phrases in the related and unrelated lists were matched for familiarity of the individual components and differed only in the associative strength of the object-action relationship. Although verbatim recall of unrelated lists was poorer under standard verbal encoding conditions, enactment succeeded in bringing performance to the level of related lists, indicating that enactment's influence on episodic integration was independent of the semantic relatedness of the object and action components. Analysis of partial recall errors (accurate recall of only one component) suggested that enactment benefited recall in the unrelated lists by improving memory for the action and reducing fragmentation of the association, providing further support for the unitization view. This pattern of results was replicated in normal older adults, a population that exhibits particular difficulty with episodic memory for unrelated associations. The cognitive mechanisms by which enactment may improve episodic integration in both younger and older adults are discussed.     

The role of enactment in implicit and explicit memory

Enactment during the encoding of simple imperatives has been found to improve substantially performance on conceptually driven explicit-memory tests. In two experiments the effect of this manipulation on a conceptually driven implicit test (category association) was studied. A conceptually driven explicit test (free recall) was also included. In Experiment one three different study conditions (enactment with real objects, reading, and generation) were considered. In Experiment two there were two study conditions (enactment with imaginary objects and reading). Compared to reading, generation was found to improve the performance on both free recall and category association, whereas enactment affected free recall only. In a final experiment subjects imagined that they performed the tasks, and this manipulation was found to improve the memory performance on both tests. Taken together, this pattern of results is interpreted as suggesting that free recall and category association have a process in common that is sensitive to semantic processing at study (promoted by generation and imagery, but not by enactment), and that free recall involves a retrieval process in addition that is facilitated by a rich encoding environment (provided by enactment).     

Effects of enactment by professional actors at encoding and retrieval

This experiment investigated memory benefits similar to those found with subject-performed tasks (SPTs) but under widely differing circumstances. Almost all SPT research has shown that as long as enactment takes place at encoding, mode of recall (enactment vs. verbal recall) is immaterial. Using professional actors, the experimenters had previously shown (Noice & Noice, 1999) that movement that was not semantically congruent with the accompanying material produced enhanced recall at retrieval compared to a non-moving condition, a result that did not appear to be due to the fact that retrieval conditions closely resembled encoding conditions. Experiment 1 of the present study replicated and extended this finding, demonstrating that the effect can be found after a delay of five months with actors of varying age and experience, and that the enhancement is not dependent on physical context. Experiment 2 demonstrated that, even with purely verbal retrieval of material that had been equated for memorability, dialogue originally performed when the participants had been engaged in movement from place to place was better recalled than dialogue originally performed when the participants had remained in one location. Taken together, these results indicate that movement at retrieval is not necessary for the nonliteral enactment effect to occur, but that such movement can aid recall compared to a purely verbal mode of report.