Paradox and Play: from Enactment to the concept of the Third

When I decided to write about play, I turned to my friend Phil Ringstrom, who has been our teacher in relational play, a fellow traveler in broadening the perspective of recognizing the importance of action and processing all the ways in which the art form of drama can be used. , especially improvisation. Although any attempt to summarize it would be unfair, the essence of the analytic stance in the analytic game can be summed up in the catchphrase: "Yes, And!". This phrase replaces 'Yes, But' or even worse 'No, But' - as in 'I know better'.

In my theoretical framework the response "Yes, And" is a kind of method, putting into practice the idea of "Both, And", which marks the position of the Third - the Third position, which is the one that moves beyond " Either/Or' of 'My way or your way'. The Third can also be seen as a kind of movement that frees us from the impasse of the complementary duality, the "my way or the highway" opposition, in which there can be only one reality, only one correct interpretation. The position in which, metaphorically, only one mind can survive. Borrowing from Gadamer's thinking about play as any movement ¨To and From', we can add that play is an act that creates a

Third by widening the edges of the Either/Or in a wider movement: going Forward and Backward to include both or multiple sides.

 

In my previous work I have shown how enactments appear in this structure of the complementary opposition of my way or your way, in which each person feels at the same time "doer and done to// the doer and the done to." . As a result, the "doer done to" relation reflects a situation in which the back-and-forth movement, between my way and your way, my point of view and your point of view, has been blocked by crossing. Each participant owns one side and holds it tightly by splitting projecting or intersecting their awareness of identification with the complementary side, which may often be familiar to them in other states of self. The more crossed these states are, perhaps, the harder it is to swing back and forth. For this reason, we could say that the "Both/And" position of the game aims to facilitate a version of connection between the complementary positions that makes visible the interactions, or the possibility of a joint identification with both. Consider, for example, an interaction in which one person feels judged and claims that the other is criticizing—both are very familiar with the positions of "judging" and "being judged," but for the moment both may not to be aware that the counter-move of the one who is being judged against the accusation he makes against the other is part of a repetition (a loop) in which both feel accused. Regaining identification with the

feeling or the position of the other, this is a form of recognition, this perspective, or holding the opposites, of both/and – potentially including the idea that in this situation I could feel as you do, we could reverse the roles, opens up the space of the third.

 

The non-linear emergence probabilities emphasized by Don Stern are another way to think about this loosening of the "my way or yours" construct. Through the intersubjective sense, therefore, play means the ability to find a way within the way (or a road within the road) within the 'we' position of the 'both/and'.
 

I will show how the movement from acting to play, with the "both/and" structure, is part of how we move through complementarity to thirdness. Within this movement, the acceptance and preservation of the paradox play an important role, because the paradox is what we call an opposition, in which we cannot or should not resolve the opposition by denying one side, or even, by resolving and composing. In "Play and Reality" Winnicott writes:

 

“My contribution is to ask that the paradox be accepted, endured and respected and not resolved. Through the flight to the split of mental function, it is possible to resolve the paradox,

but the price of this is the loss of the value of the paradox itself (Winnicott, 1971, xii).

Indeed, it is difficult to distinguish between play and performance. I suggest that play can be differentiated from acting through an acceptance of the paradox – the dramatic act appears simultaneously as both real (as a feeling) and as something not necessarily real (only a part of us feels this, or a part he knows that it is a dramatization etc). We use this potential space of paradox in order to facilitate play, in which intersecting parts can be spoken and communicated.

 

As previously formulated by Ghent, performances are a kind of live theater where the aim is to identify the meaning of the script in order to “clarify a set of early traumatic experiences that could never be integrated (Ghent, 1992, 151). It took another decade of work to realize that enactments are difficult to recognize, precisely because these disembodied experiences were obscured by the shadow of intersectionality (Bass, 2003; Black, 2003; Bromberg, 1998; 2006, 2011), which falls upon the analyst and the patient. Performances came to be seen as a dramatization of intersecting states of self, revealing unformed experience and requiring us – often humiliated, confused or even ashamed – to reflect on our own participation. Again, paradoxically, by making crossing communicative, the very performance it covers also serves the

Revelation. As Broomberg has put it: "A dissociative psychic structure is designed to avoid the cognitive representation of what may be intolerable to the psyche, but it also operates in such a way as to facilitate dissociatively activated communication of non-symbolized emotional experience." ». Or, as Ghent (1992) puts it, that which seeks recognition is masked by something almost like itself, as when "need is masquerading as neediness." The need for a witness to one's pain can appear as a lament that no one sees or understands what one is suffering for. Or the need for a truth that may have been in denial and unseen may appear as a belief that is once again in denial.

 

Note the dialectic: even as it prevents symbolic play of the kind that psychoanalysis has historically privileged, the enactment facilitates communication by 'playing' it. In this sense, acting itself presents a paradox: it is not a misstep, but (paralleling Winnicott's thinking about destructiveness) something that is easy to miss – if we fail to recognize it, to work through the drama so that we can finally understand its productive potential (Aron & Atlas, 2015).

Essentially, through the dramatization or performance of the unspeakable, the apocryphal/revealing act of the shared non-self can be understood as dreamwork. But rather than looking from the outside in and decoding, the enactment requires the analyst to work from the inside out. He should allow the

itself to be used not only to contain, but also to embody (M. Hoffman,). We must lend ourselves, let ourselves 'play a part', as Freud famously refused to do with Dora. In doing so, we encourage the development of no-self experience—until its limitations are exploded so that meanings can be arranged and symbolized. I suggest that the tension of paradox itself is essential to psychoanalysis, as it constitutes the essential condition that provides the mode of working between delusion and reality. Paradox is a mainstay of our method, the situation in which we use transference. And yet, paradoxical positions are also inherently unstable and tend to collapse toward one position or the other. The desire to resolve the paradox is often a desire to escape from the tension of opposing realities – thus reinstating or perpetuating crossing as the (only) way to manage the opposition.

To give an example, accepting the paradox means that because you are my analyst, I feel like you are my mother, for better and for worse (sick). It is only because you are my analyst that I can feel this – otherwise, it would be too infantile, too embarrassing. But, if I already feel a lot of shame about the ways I was weaned from my mother, I can't handle this paradox – to start feeling dependent or feeling a deep feeling for you is very scary. So, on the contrary, I feel that because you are my analyst, I should not feel such feelings. Or, to put it another way, I don't think you feel like you're my ideal lover, because you're my analyst.


On the contrary, because I however i have such feelings, that means you should be my lover, and it's tragic that you're not, or it's a sham to pretend you don't feel the same way. Wherever such insistence appears in reality as opposed to fantasy or in fantasy as opposed to reality, the playing out of such intersecting parts occurs, and playing with these parts becomes impossible. Crossing appears and is done. As Phil (Ringstrom 1998) has shown, we can use double bind theory to understand where this is leading. An important paradox in which the patient plays is to see what happens between us as a real consequence, but without the usual consequences. More specifically, he must see the analyst both as the one who will heal him, and as the one to whom he will transfer his fears and traumas.