According to Jeremy Safran, whom the present book is dedicated to as well as to Lewis Aron, although the number of empirical confirmation is constantly increasing, the debate which opposes those who believe it is better to conceptualize psychoanalysis as a natural science and those who prefer to consider it as a hermeneutical discipline will inevitably go on.  The reason for this lies in the fact that psychoanalysis is situated at the border of a lot of disciplines and different sciences (Safran, 2012). This concept is very meaningful of the intention inherent in this publication and in the collection, “Borders of Psychoanalysis”, to which it belongs. This collection is devoted to publishing books in order to investigate an area of research that our publishing house wants to cover since its foundation: that of the dialogue of contemporary psychoanalysis with ‘confining’ disciplines (for example, neuroscience, infant research, cultural anthropology), often with epistemologies that for origin and history appear to be incomparable to it. As Safran wrote, though problematic and source of confusion among different psychoanalytic approaches, this epistemological status of psychoanalysis, related to its condition of ‘liminality’, is a meaningful source of vitality for the discipline (Safran, 2012).

   The question of  borders or boundaries was at the core of a book I edited in 2009 (in Italian) and in 2012 (in English): “Psychoanalysis and its Borders”. The name itself of the publishing house I founded in 2007, Frenis Zero, echoes the same meaning: «The genesis of the neologism ‘Frenis’ recalls the Greek word ‘phrenes’ which has the double semantic denotation of  ‘mind’, as well as ‘diaphragm’, thus referring to a mental that can be thought of on the basis of special metaphors like that of ‘border’, ‘boundary’ and ‘limit’» (Leo, 2012, p. 17). And in the same page I wrote: «In the Italian language dictionary De Mauro ‘border’  is defined as “the end, the extreme boundary of a territory”, but also as “transition zone close to a geographical, cultural, or administrative boundary”. In the Dictionary of the Italian language by Gabrielli (2008), ‘border’ (‘confine’ in Italian) is derived from ‘cum’ and ‘finis’, and therefore the etymology indicates something “that has an end (a limit) in common”. ‘Border’, then, refers to two complementary concepts: that of ‘distinction’, referring to separation; that of ‘transition’, referring to the passage from one state to the next» (Leo, 2012, pp.17-18).

   I will explore the subject of enactment in relation to boundaries in psychoanalysis, referring to a series of viewpoints that lead to many crucial subject areas (Leo, 2012, p.18):

a)     1) From an intra-psychic point of view, the ‘border’ can be used to denote the limits  between internal (world) and external (world), psyche and soma, psychic apparatuses (first topic) and ‘provinces’ (second topic), primary and secondary process, perception and representation, representation and affect, Ego and object, subject and object (included the concept of ‘transitional space’ by Winnicott).

b)    2) From an inter-psychic point of view, ‘border’ can be associated with the concept of intersubjectivity and ‘the third’ (Aron, 2006; Benjamin, 2004) to indicate the functioning that affects the entire analytic pair at work. The concepts of ‘third topic’ (Cahn, 2002; Racamier, 1993), of analytic field (Baranger & Baranger, 2008), as well as of ‘analytic third’ by Ogden refer to the same realm of ‘the third’, even though, as Aron (2006) wrote, «it is often defined ambiguously and inconsistently across schools. (…) For some, the third refers to something beyond the dyad, a context within which we emerge; for others, the third is an emergent property of dyadic interaction, and yet for others, the third is a dyadic achievement  that creates the psychic space necessary for reflexive awareness and mentalization» (Aron, 2006, p.356).  But the third is to be taken into account  also as the wider context in which therapy is to be considered: general theoretical assumptions and technical prescriptions (the clinical frame), valid as a common ground (Wallerstein, 1990), but also the impact of analytic practice on those ethical, transcultural or legal issues constituting the wider extra-clinical frame. So, at this level we can place all the theories on borders of the analytic setting and on boundary violations, that involve not only borders at the inter-psychic level, but also those concerned in the two following ones.

c)     3)From an intra-disciplinary point of view (inside psychoanalysis), the ‘border’ serves to distinguish the various currents of contemporary psychoanalytic thought, both on the basis of crucial polarity on a more strictly theoretical level (think of the dichotomies of trauma/ fantasy, conflict/developmental block, empiricism/hermeneutics) and on the technical (past/present, interpretation/relation, psychoanalysis/psychotherapy) (Mitchell & Black, 1995).

d)    4)From an inter-disciplinary point of view, the ‘border’ plays the role of a bridge between psychoanalysis and the other clinical disciplines (especially psychiatry), but also infant research and neuroscience, such as I will argue in this introduction.

e)     5)I  add an inter-cultural point of view, from which the ‘border’ can be considered as a transitional concept allowing to enlight cultural counter-transference phenomena in transcultural clinical setting.

f)      6)Finally, from a trans-generational point of view, studies on the transmission of a traumatic condition across several generations (Bohleber, 2015; Faimberg, 2005) cannot disregard the fact that the “borders” between the generations are also places of links and largely unconscious narcissistic pacts (Aulagnier, 1975;  Kaës, 2018).

(...)

At this regard according to me we have to take into account two main stances, related to enactment and  coming from the two authors this book is dedicated to: authenticity and  generativeness of enactment. The first one has been developed by Jeremy Safran with  his unique way of teaching psychotherapy, and the latter one has led Lewis Aron to coin the concept of ‘generative enactment’. In this book Safran and Kraus develop the concept that metacommunication, i.e. the process of communicating with the patient about the implicit transaction taking place in the therapeutic relationship,  can be considered as a practice of ‘mindfulness in action’ aiming not only to ameliorate therapeutic alliance, but also, implicitly, the therapist’s capacity to authentically  behave according to a bi-personal perspective, grounding his/her awareness in the immediate experience of some aspect of the therapeutic relationship, rather than higher level inferences (interpretations, intellectual theorizations of  what occurs in the here and now). Thanks to metacommunication the therapist can empower his/her ability to ‘play with an open hand’ with the patient, to attempt reducing the imbalance of power that is inherent to the relationship between one ‘who knows’ and one another ‘who does not know’ (Safran, 2012). Authenticity, by the part of the therapist, means emphasizing the value of learning from his/her patients, not only on the basis of what they tell verbally, but mostly by recognizing his/her own contribution to enactment in which he/she is involved with them (Safran, 2012) by playing with them in various dramatic scenarios. But authenticity for Safran was a stance ‘embodied’ in his own way of teaching psychotherapy, by appearing in various occasions (in congresses, seminars, webinars, and even in You Tube videos) in video recorded sessions with his patients, hence exposing himself to the public’s observations, remarks and judgements.

   Generative enactment is a main subject of the last book that Lewis Aron wrote with Galit Atlas (Aron, Atlas, 2017). This concept means something wider than solely  involving the creative dimension of enactment: it contains a prospective function, somewhat unconsciously ‘looking forward’ to future possibilities, as «all productions of the mind, all compromise formations, include some unconscious anticipation of the future, efforts to transform our fate into our destiny» (Aron, Atlas, 2015, p.310). Aron and Atlas, inspired in this by Carl Gustav Jung (Aron, Atlas, 2015), write that

Enactments are one of the royal roads to the fulfillment of our destinies. Building on a relational understanding of enactment, we propose that just as our interpretations employ visions of the psychic future, that so too our mutual enactments anticipate or are reconstructions of the future. They are mini-experiments, relational trials, rehearsals, the purpose of which is to test out, modify, and refine aspects of the self’s relational repertoire so as to expand relational options by finding transformational objects facilitating the transformation from fate to destiny. Enactments, and not only their interpretation or resolution, are thus a creative medium for giving psychological birth to or actualizing the self. Our unconscious participation in enactment is not only pushed or driven, determined by our past history or present circumstances, but is shaped in line with our psychic futures (Aron, Atlas, 2015, p.318).

   A closing remark about the frontcover picture of this book is needed: this is one of my drawings in which I portrayed Pina Bausch, the German dancer and choreographer who revolutionized 20th-century ballet. «Bausch was a great artistic transmogrifier and an alchemist of the psychology and psychopathology of the everyday life we have all experienced in the flesh and in the soul: the longing for love, the incurable sadism, the crazy unpredictability and unfairness of life’s relational mix of intimacy and isolation, and the jolie laide (beautiful ugly) nature of the world. In this sense, she was a relational theorist as well. But like all alchemists, she smelled out the gold in the shit and the shit in the gold» (Samuels, 2017, p. 715). As psychoanalysis is somewhat messy, not smooth (as Lewis Aron said in one of his last conferences, the one I followed in Rome on November 24, 2018), therapist-patient relationship is an unpredictable ‘dance’ just like Bausch’s choreography. A dance in which «negative emotions, efforts at repair, and a covert sexuality» may have operated «as an early signal system for affects that were approaching but had not yet reached consciousness» (Jacobs, 2001, p. 187).  And the inevitability of enactments with the patient rather than being considered only as a mark of the therapist’s fallibility, if  recognized, it is to be viewed as a sign of authenticity and potential creativity, what Aron called ‘generative enactment’. Generative enactment and research of authenticity: these are two of the most important legacies of these two outstanding psychoanalysts, unfortunately too prematurely passed away, Jeremy Safran and Lewis Aron.

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