The Untelling: Enactment, Narrative and Time in Psychoanalysis

Robert Grossmark, PhD, ABPP

Saturday Feb 6, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

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.