“Call Me by Your Name”: The Wrong Action: From Ferenczi to Enactment as a Process

Abstract

It is always hard for psychoanalysis to connect free associations and action. With Freud, action could be interpreted only when it referred to the transference; otherwise, action was a resistance to the possibility of free association. Unlike Freud, Ferenczi recognized the importance of the analyst's acting-out as the patient's unconscious request for experiences of trauma to be mobilized. By presenting a clinical case, the author offers the analyst's error as the mobilization of a traumatic block. The error activates a “Process of enactment,” whereas if the error is not considered positively, it is simply a mistake, or the loss of a creative opportunity.