Essential Enactments: Commentary on Paper by Taras Babiak

Enactments are ubiquitous and are fruitful ways of examining minipsychodramas that possess our patients' lives. Addressed improvisationally, they set the stage for a different story to be written. Impasses, by contrast, do not readily yield to such examination. They often come in the form of “crunches,” “double binds,” and “relational (k)nots,” wherein the needed and repeated dimensions of the transference disqualify one another, leading to such circumstances as “To feel sane, I must forgo love; and to feel loved, I must forgo my sanity.” A discussion of Babiak's treatment of Bart illustrates how he narrowly escapes having powerfully urgent enactments devolve into impenetrable impasses.