'This focus on enactments as communicators of affective building blocks also reflects a growing realisation that explicit content, verbal interpretations, and the mere act of uncovering memories are insufficient venues for curative shifts. Rather, a growing emphasis has been given to the transformative power embedded in unconscious affective interactions that bring to life and consequently alter implicit memories and attachment styles' (p. 317).
'Often described as relational impasses, enactments create an intersubjective field in which both patient and analyst find themselves in an ongoing emotional entanglement that temporarily diminishes the likelihood of meaningful reflection' (p.318).
'Fully dissociated was her enormous dread of being emotionally invaded and controlled. The painful, protracted enactment exposed core unconscious relational patterns and affective memories that characterised almost all of Tina's interactions with others - an intense fear of being emotionally violated and forced to adapt to the other and myriad automatic defences all designed to preserve her own sense of autonomy' (p.321).
'Enactments are in essence an expression of the repetition compulsion process whose unconscious form needs to be made conscious and integrated' (p. 322).
'Fear conditioning by the amygdala is an implicit form of learning occuring without conscious awareness from early infancy.... an emotional environment that is primarily one of anxiety and misattunement results in a more frequent activation of the fear systems and of automatic defences...the developing neural systems become skewed towards creating and repeating self-states characterised by heightened interpersonal anxiety and poor affect regulation rather than by positive affect and openness' (p. 323).
Introjective identification is mentioned but barely explored in this paper - I guess it's still a little difficult to take a neuroscientific perspective on what ToM and it's correlates might constitute. I need to dig a little deeper into the introjective process and the formation of Theory Of Mind in the developmental frame, though. I remember reading some somewhat derisive commentary from Freud about the Christian model of introjective identification - about grown adults requiring a visceral model of the Body and Blood of Christ which is the bread and wine consumed, in order that the qualities of Christ are symbolically interred, as our own. The heartbreaking way that the Christian story is literally taken and is used to create division amongst peoples - even today - tells me that we haven't come so far with developing symbolic thought processes as Freud might have hoped for back in 1915.
It's interesting to watch my own thought processes as I delve through these texts on psychoanalysis - something in me wants to offer Christianity, the whole, blinking movement of it, a psychological account of why it's so important to shift narrow, literal ways of living within a Christian story, a Christian context. To offer all the peoples of the world a chance to see symbols for what they are, appreciate the flexibility of their existence and the inherent paradox of being a human being with conflicting thoughts and feelings and no absolute, real, finite self.
Which is of course what the Jesus discourse precisely determines to establish.
Hmm. Me and my grand, unifying theories - I too, possibly most of all in this way, am subject to the pathology of a system.
Intriguing.
Ginot, E. (2007). Intersubjectivity and Neuroscience: Understanding enactments and their therapeutic significance within emerging paradigms. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 24(2), 317-332.
http://www.ahealthymind.org/ans/library/Ginot%20intersubjective-neuroscience%2007.pdf
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