Playing: listening to the enacted dimension of the analytic process*

Metapsychology or metapsychologies? Some comments on Paul Denis's paper ‘The drive revisited: mastery and satisfaction’

“…However, this third position is in my opinion the culmination of a prolonged prior transference–countertransference process during which the analyst is projectively identified by the patient is such a way that he represents, in the sense of performing, a certain relational script contained in the patient's psyche that cannot be recalled verbally. This, I believe, is the root of the change of paradigm in psychoanalytic technique entailed by Freud's concept of Agieren (Freud, ), which was reclaimed by Winnicott as playing and which anticipates the present‐day notion of enactment (Sapisochin, ).…”

“…This is an unconscious, but not repressed, imaginary register represented as sequences of psychic gestures exchanged by the subject with successive internal objects (Sapisochin, , , , ). It is very different from what Paul Denis calls the register of representations , understood as verbal representations.…”

“…In another dimension of the analytic process, however, the patient's words have the secret meaning of giving rise to a certain countertransference position in the analyst. This is an unconscious emotional position that causes him to represent – in the dramatic sense of the term Agieren – a given relational script of the analysand's that cannot be recalled in words because it has been registered in the psyche non‐verbally (Sapisochin, , , ). It is a representation enacted by the analytic couple which constitutes the non‐discursive symbolization (Langer, , p. 93) of certain psychic elements that are not mediated by verbal language.…”

“…In several earlier contributions (Sapisochin, , , , ) I expressed the view that in introducing the concept of Agieren in , Freud was postulating a new mode of psychic work for the creation of verbal memories of particularly important experiences not recorded in verbal thought. Freud, it will be recalled, here maintained that patients did not remember verbally, but enacted on the analytic stage, this being their way of remembering.…”