Robert Grossmark, Ph.D. “The Untelling: Enactment, Narrative and Time in Psychoanalysis”
February 4, 2022Presentation Summary:
Trauma and neglect are often not inscribed symbolically and thus remain unrepresented and unremembered. As such they can be said to reside in an “unpast” that retains a hold over the psyche, limiting thought, experience, and affect. In an attempt to work with “what is not there,” an unobtrusive relational analyst companions the patient into worlds of inchoate and unstructured experience that announce trauma and neglect in the dimension of mutual enactment and constitute a unique “untelling”, a lived narrative of what is not yet known or thought. A rich case example will amplify these theoretical ideas and illustrate how the unknown “unpast” is transformed via the “untelling” of mutual enactment into a lived experience that can then become the past and allow the patient to be free.
Learning Objectives:
Participants in this presentation will be able to:
1. Orient to their own experiences with patients as incarnations of the patient’s unexperienced early trauma and be unobtrusive to these arisings.
2. Discern the states that require unobtrusive companioning, as opposed to states where companioning might involve more vocal and impactful presence.