Re-enactment Of Past Research Articles

When Should We Not Interpret? The Analyst’s Transformative Act as a Vital Contribution to the Patient’s Sense of Being Real and Alive

Should the analyst do anything else besides interpret? What constitutes an act within the analytic setting? And what signifies an act as analytic? The author reviews previous contributions to this literature, putting forward the idea that the analyst’s act is never isolated from the context of the analysis and the whole of the transference-countertransference relationship. Yet, under certain circumstances, it is not interpretation or the understanding of something that facilitates the transformation, but the experiencing of something that the analyst does. Through the careful 10 examination of previous conceptualizations (enactment, interpretive act), the author proposes that the analyst’s transformative act is a conscious-spontaneous act, not a reenactment of past. This idea will be discussed in light of the idea of playing and some recent thinking concerning ontological psychoanalysis.

V.S. Naipaul’s <i>A way in the world</i>: contesting liminality by translating the historical past

In this article the concept of liminality is understood in a broad sense to mean the incompleteness of historical representation and the restrained view of reality. The ensuing discussion of the theme will be divided into three parts; each incorporating parts of Paul Ricoeur’s analyses in “The reality of the historical past” (1984). Ricoeur investigates the reality of the historical past under three categories – the Same, the Other, and the Analogue. Under the sign of “the Same”, contesting liminality is first discussed as the re-enactment of the historical past. This re-enactment of the past, however, has differences in the present on account of imaginative reinterpretations and repatternings of documentary evidence. Under the sign of ”the Other”, the second part or the article discusses Naipaul’s strategy of taking distance to counteract liminality in rewriting the historical past from the vantage point of a writer-traveller. Finally, the analysis under the sign of “the Analogue” points out that the commitment to combat liminality implies an unending attempt at rectifying and reconfiguring the historical past in order to accomplish continuity and renewal.