Abstract
This presentation will address the challenges when working with patients whose trauma does not avail itself to symbolization and mentalization. We will outline how the analyst can unobtrusively create the safe and robust space within which the fullness of the patient’s internal world and trauma can be realized and companioned. Rather than viewing enactment as a deviation from the work of analysis, this approach places the enacted dimension at the heart of the treatment and views enactment as the narration of the unrepresented and unsymbolized in the language of action and impact. This approach foregrounds the ontological aspects of the treatment and the emphasis is on companioning and being-with the patient in their unique idiom and register rather than seeking to bring the patient into the analyst’s reality and understanding. This unique therapeutic relationship offers the space for the instantiation of time such that trauma can be located in memory and the past. This involves the un-telling and un-doing of prior “translations”, personality structures and relational patterns such that being and time can be re-assembled and re-integrated.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this presentation, participants will be able to:
1. Discuss three elements that comprise the concept of an unobtrusive yet relational analyst.
2. Articulate two examples of how an analyst enters the patient’s world rather than bringing the patient into the reality of the analyst.
3. Identify specific examples of unworded phenomena expressed in mutual enactment.
Biography
Robert Grossmark, Ph.D., ABPP, is a psychoanalyst in New York City. He works with individuals, groups, and couples and conducts psychoanalytic consultation and study groups. Dr. Grossmark is on the teaching and supervising faculty at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; The Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research; The National Institute for the Psychotherapies Program in Adult
Psychoanalysis; The National Training Program in Psychoanalysis; and National Faculty Member, the Florida Psychoanalytic Center. He also lectures at other psychoanalytic institutes and clinical psychology training programs nationally and internationally. He is an Associate Editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues.
Dr. Grossmark is the author of The Unobtrusive Relational Analyst: Explorations in Psychoanalytic Companioning and co-edited The One and the Many: Relational Approaches to Group Psychotherapy and Heterosexual Masculinities: Contemporary Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Gender Theory, all published by Routledge.
References
Grossmark, R. (2012). The unobtrusive relational analyst. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 22(6), 629-646.
Grossmark, R. (2016). Psychoanalytic companioning. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 26(6), 698-712.
Grossmark, R. (2023). A child is being murdered: A contemporary psychoanalytic treatment of a compulsion to child pornography. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 40(1), 25.
Grossmark, R. (2024). The untelling. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 34(1), 3-19.
Grossmark, R. (2025). Trauma and enactments in group psychotherapy. In Advances in group therapy trauma treatment (pp. 103-116). Routledge.
