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Women & Performance: a journal of

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Reflections on sessions early in an

analysis: Trauma, affect and enactive
witnessing
Patricia Ticineto Clough

Sociology and Women's Studies, Graduate Center and Queens

College, City University of New York , New York, USA
Published online: 04 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Patricia Ticineto Clough (2009) Reflections on sessions early in an analysis:
Trauma, affect and enactive witnessing, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory,
19:2, 149-159, DOI: 10.1080/07407700903034139
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Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory

Vol. 19, No. 2, July 2009, 149159

Reflections on sessions early in an analysis: Trauma, affect and

enactive witnessing
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Patricia Ticineto Clough*

Sociology and Womens Studies, Graduate Center and Queens College,
City University of New York, New York, USA
The essay explores psychoanalytic sessions where witnessing to trauma is
treated as a matter of the transmission of bodily affect rather than the
production of a meaningful narration of traumatic symptoms. Attention is
paid to the theorizing of affect in contemporary psychoanalysis and critical
theory, focusing on performance and relationality.
Keywords: trauma; preconsciousness; enaction; proprioception; witnessing

Reflection I
In a book review of Kathryn Harrisons When They Slept, An Inquiry into the Murder
of a Family, the reviewer Robert Pinsky writes: The violations that destroy human
lives, or maim them, seem to demand telling . . . Mythology and literature (and their
descendant, the Freudian talking cure) manifest a profound hunger for narrating
what is called, paradoxically the unspeakable (8 June 2008, 1). No doubt, the very
notion of the unspeakable raises imaginings of profoundly troubling familial and
now all too familiar acts of harmful abuse made to speak again and again in the
voice of those wild with a need for recognition. Pinsky does go on to remind us of
Philomela, who raped and her tongue torn out, nonetheless, becomes a nightingale
singing the perpetrators guilt (1).
Harrison not surprisingly is drawn to this family story not the story of Billy
Gilley who, in his 40s, still is in prison for killing his parents and one of his sisters,
after years of terrible, terrible abuses to the boy. No, Harrison is drawn to the story
of Jody Gilley, the one survivor, Billys other sister. Suffering a massively destructive
wounding, Jody is willing to give her story to Harrison who also is the author of
The Kiss (1998), an account of her father who with inappropriate kiss, tongue
thrust into his daughters mouth, seduced her into years of incestuous violation.
Harrison is well equipped to reproduce the flat affect of Jodys report, a searched for
factuality drawn out of moments that Jody tells she experienced as if in a novel, or as
if happening in a book. The flat affect of Jodys report, in Harrisons telling, points
to Harrisons own story of the dissociation and depersonalization of moments

*Email: pclough@gc.cuny.edu
ISSN 0740770X print/ISSN 17485819 online
2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/07407700903034139
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of horror and terror when intimate bonds are drawn to what is violently removed
from acknowledgement with severely traumatic effects: the unspeakability of the
unspeakable.
It is the unspeakability of the unspeakable that is a challenge to psychoanalysis.
Or put another way, while long criticized for a distant perhaps even unresponsive
silence, the psychoanalyst who instead narrates or even helps the patient narrate his
or her story may fail to respond to a need to go beyond or beneath meaning and
simply witness unspeakable yet embodied wounds. Witnessing may well begin with
a refusal to think that wounds are necessary to becoming human that they are
ordinary and thus their narration salutary, if not socially required. The thought that
wounding is necessary to human subjectivity feeds therapeutic aims converging with
the ambitions of analysts and analysands for curative explanation in an insistence on
a certain relation of the psychic and language. In recent times this relationship has
involved a privileging of language in the construction of the subject: bodily life
wounded by culture, subjected to language in the becoming of the speaking subject.
Even when it is accepted that the subject in trauma cannot speak, it is expected
that the body will and thus the expectation of speech remains the horizon. But if
witnessing does not use language to speak but to touch, to be affective, then a critical
engagement with the in-between affect and psychoanalysis may draw us to look
at practice, especially the performative aspects of the speechless but affective
relationship of enactive witnessing, where it may not be clear there is a witness, only
a witnessing.
The room was not completely silent when she first heard it. There were ungodly sounds
all around. Perhaps the sounds were of her crying, moaning, and groaning, as if coming
from somewhere outside her, over there, in the apartment where she grew up, where her
cries mixed with the sounds of her mothers screaming. The sound of fright: night
terrors now in day light. She is bent over in the chair, her head dropped in her hands,
fallen to her lap. She is folding herself into herself, rocking, rocking, rocking, when she
hears him say it, her name, and then sympathetically, how horrible! She feels a
strange sensation, wildness inside, for a mere few seconds: shocked realization, seeking
contact, soothing in the pain extended in those seconds.

Someone is there for her but she can hardly be there in the chair, remembering
herself as a little girl in the apartment where she grew up. There is a story that could
be told about her mother, who in 1909, was born to her grandmother, then a young
woman of 16, who, in 1907 arrives in the United States from Messina Sicily, where a
year latter, in 1908, one in three residents died in an earthquake that nearly destroyed
everything there. Maybe it was the loss of the rest of her family, or the violent
eruption of the earth that she could not help but imagine over and over again that led
the little girls grandmother to marry a man who would sweet talk her and brutally
beat her regularly. Maybe the little girls mother too. Who knows; do you?
She had been there just months before the first session, walking in Messinas graveyard
larger than the downtown. Every effort had been made to memorialize the torn up,
burnt up bodies of the dead. She walked among the worn-thin head stones looking for
names she did not know.

In their early sessions, he rarely spoke; there were no interpretations offered. Left
to do something so simple and so difficult: to come to know, no, to feel his coming

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and going in her imagination, the minutes of presence before abandonment would
replace everything in the space of the time of the session. At the door, the knob in her
hand turns, the unbearable loneliness returns, full force without recourse to some
defense, only a reliving straight out, nearing the desire for death. She turns away and
out the door. Oh to be able to come back at least once more.
Enactive witnessing does not hold the psychoanalytic to a cultural function of
interpretation, clarification, clear communication. Enactive witnessing occurs below
meaning where the inhuman beats its traumatic repetitions in what cannot maintain
itself as a speaking subject.1 Nor is it yet the moment for recognizing all the others
all of us, broken too just like me, just like you. One three four two six seven all
the children go to heaven. Victims statistically counted, managed and controlled: the
numbers do grow, grow data shadows, but there is no one. No one hears the beats.
But what might the two do: she there in her chair, and he there in his, catching sound
echoes bouncing off the dust of erupted memories? Are you still there? Do you still
care? What if there are no lessons here?

Reflection II
It is not to remember that we relive the unspeakable. The unspeakable is not
forgotten but it also is not remembered. Memories are false; that is they draw the
powers of the false to them.2 The unspeakable can only be falsified in the memories
that take hold of life, when a body cannot go on but does go on in memories to
be offered for narration. The powers of the false take back from narrated memory
that possibility of feeling the immobility, the feeling of being nailed down in one
place and the rest of the body stretching like the skin on the stretched canvas of
a Frances Bacon painting. Life lunges into dead time, the time of the unspeakable
that nonetheless is where the multiplicity of time is: living in more than one time at
a time. There are many times. Psychoanalysis is not about remembering memories
but remembering in the multiplicity of time. There is no past or future psyche. The
psyche is unfolding times that are always only of the present, the eternal multiple
present. This is the awful gift of traumas beating rhythms: the absolute necessity of
recovering the multiplicity of time in the dead time of the unspeakable.
The image begins to move. She stretches and snaps back again and again tearing from
that nailed down place. And it would be hard to say where she is, over there in the
apartment where she grew up, in the chair there where she is falling, let go to a demon
swarm. Her body twitches and there is no one to save her. What is true? What is true?
Is it too early to know or maybe too late?

Another story could be told. The little girls father was five when his mother let
him go, sent him away to Italy with his grandmother and grandfather, and left him
there until he was ten. Too soon. He never recovered. In the end, he was still full of
rage. Too late. He hated his mother and sometimes the little girls mother and the
little girl too. He hated his mother but it is not likely she knew or cared, causing his
mind to snap, break away, stretch and snap back again, and then who knows what
he could do. Who knows what he did do? What is true?

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In the bedroom, she sees flowers growing all over the place. The young and tender
tendrils work their way into her mind and down over her body, wrapping round, like a
golden chain holding her sane. Only her lips move: 1 2 3 slowly start 3 2 1 to build a
machine 2 1 3 to keep the pieces together 2 3 1 let the machine 3 1 2 do it to you 3 its easy
now 2 its easy now 1 its easy now

The feel: the repeating refrain of pain, the pulsing beats of shame, the rough
edges of something coming back, turning affection bad again, the moaning
and groaning from a body not quite hers but insisting on being there in the
apartment where she grew up and there in her chair, mouth opened and tongue
untied asking for forgiveness. Not quite sure what wrong has been done but asking:
Do you believe me? And she makes fast research of his face. She wants to see him
and she does see him: not still, not unshaken, a responsiveness in affects arising,
mood shifting. Across his face, finely distilled memories come and go dispersing
something through the room: a mist of care. Some hope in his being there still in his
chair.
It is not that there is no meaning. It is that psychoanalysis can extend the time of
meaninglessness.

She went to see him once, twice and again to fix her mind. She wanted to know
why she thought the way she thought, why she wrote what she wrote. It seemed her
thought was driven by a madness that was reaching a threshold beyond which
nothing would be the same. Not a thinking/writing block that threatens to prevent
but a block ready to implode, the shards of broken glass in her hand cutting the
family stories to pieces. And that event coming to mind: the blood still red fresh, at
the age of five, her tendon severed in the right hand the writing hand with a shard
of glass she had picked up to hold and then slipped and went falling into her blood
splattered everywhere.
It was a short time after, when the numbers became easy when asked: seven times six
nine times eight thirteen times ten fourteen times twelve sixteen times fifteen her fathers
adding machine making music like the metronome accompanying her piano playing.
Easy now easy now easy now. In the operating room the ether drops onto the mask that
covers her face. Counting backwards, falling, falling into the white light space of
oblivion.

From his chair, he reaches for her in the rhythm of words that sound between
them as they talk about reading and writing. She reads a loud to him what she
already had written down and words that she had newly found of philosophy,
psychoanalysis, technology, ontology, virtuality. With his careful listening, words
come easy and tumble out pretty from her mouth. Her words come back to her
bright in light and dark in the night of madness too. They come back to her as
openings to her imagination which, having once been set the task of offering escape
when there was no escape, had packed away fascinated bits and pieces of life in the
cracks of a broken reality.
And the adding machine turns over more gently and the edges of the numbers soften,
opening, turning letters into lines into rhymes, a poetic form hugging close to the red
line at the margins edge of the page in a childs copy book, her name written on one of
the spaces in the middle of the marbled black and white cover.

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The unspeakable gives birth to philosophical dreams and mathematical schemes: out
of time, in some other time and then back down to earth, where the unspeakability of
the unspeakable invites going below what has been thought, what has been written,
what has been read, to find again the force of life, the hope that can make live.

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Reflection III
Drawing on both philosophical works and psychoanalytic texts as well as going back
to Freud, Bruce Reis treats the relationship of affect and trauma in terms of what he
calls enactive witnessing.3 He defines enactive witnessing as an analytic practice
that allows memory in its varied forms, without attempting to symbolize or make
personally understandable the experience to accept the experience of the experience
of trauma, without therapeutic ambition (n.d., 1). This is not remembering as
it is often thought in psychoanalysis, Reis warns; it is not about memory in its
declarative form, i.e., as personal, linguistic narration (1).
No doubt, the recognition of trauma as an experience that has not been
consciously or even unconsciously experienced but rather has been felt in its effects or
bodily affects has been for sometime an understanding that critical theory has
shared with psychoanalytic theory. This understanding of trauma has informed the
epistemological crisis circulated in critical theories that engaged the discursive
construction of subjectivity in relationship to embodiment. A noteworthy exemplar is
Judith Butler who famously argued that it is through a traumatic foreclosure of same
sex desire that the cultural legibility of bodily matter is discursively reproduced for and
by the subject under normative conditions that Butler referred to as melancholic
heterosexuality (1990, 6772). Arguments like Butlers directed critical theory to
challenge the epistemological authority of normative discourses of cultural legibility.
But the idea of enactive witnessing proposes to engage trauma and its
characterization as being resistant to symbolization and to a linguistically oriented
narration of memory, not in the domain of epistemology, or at least not initially,
but rather in the domain of ontology or performativity in relation to bodily affect.
The analytic practice of enactive witnessing seeks ways to respect what Sue Grand
describes as the catastrophic loneliness of the traumatized person, his or her
experience of solitude that is impenetrable even as it seeks a witness (Grand
2000, 4). Recognizing the link between the impenetrable solitude of trauma and the
bodily, what enactive witnessing is meant to engage are those very acts which are
outside self-reflexivity in what Grand and Reis, following Thomas Ogden, refer to as
the autistic contiguous mode of experience (Ogden 1989). Experience in this mode
is sensory, prelinguistic and devoid of agency . . ., such that acts committed in this
modality exist only in the ephemeral somatic present and never become linguistically
encoded (Grand 2000, 4).
This psychoanalytic approach to traumatic experience resonates with critical
theorists understanding of affect. Critical theorists, especially those drawing on
the thought of Spinoza, Bergson and Deleuze, have defined affect as a bodys
capacity to affect and its susceptibility to be affected. Affect is a prelinguistic,
preconscious and preindividual capacity, an irreducible and an inexhaustible

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potential for activation. Drawing on the works of Gilbert Simondon and David
Bohm, Brain Massumi addresses the inexhaustible potentiality of affect in terms of
the ongoing becoming or individuating of bodily matter, its ongoing ability to inform
or to self-form: that is, its aliveness (2002). But it is in his treatment of affect in terms
of proprioception, interoception and exteroception that Massumis employmnent of
the works of Simondon and Bohm proposes ways to think the relation of trauma and
bodily affect.
Defining proprioception as the sensibility proper to the muscles and ligaments,
Massumi proposes that proprioception folds tactility into the body, enveloping the
skins contact with the external world in a dimension of medium depth: between
epidermis and viscera (58). At this medium depth, proprioception is asubjective
and nonobjective. It is a dimension of the flesh, that might be diagrammed as
a superposition of vectorial fields composed of multiple points in varying relations of
movement and rest, pressure and resistance, each field corresponding to a potential
action (59). Drawing on the language of physics, in pointing to the superposition
and the enfolding characteristic of dynamic matter in an implicate order, Massumi
treats the very senses of the body as enfolded into flesh by proprioception such
as eyes reabsorbed . . . through a black hole in the geometry of empirical space and a
gash in bodily form (5960). There is a certain suspension of time in the enfolding
of the senses into flesh. Or put another way, there is a certain passing of time which is
nonphenomenal or not consciously experienced.
Not unlike the suspension of time in proprioception, there is the suspension in space
that Massumi attaches to interoceptivity or viscerality below proprioception.
Interoceptivity occurs when that which is about to be sensed exteroceptively, or
through the five senses, is preceded by a visceral registering of excitation, of intensity,
which Massumi describes as the body leaping in place into a space outside actionreaction circuits, a break in the paths of stimulus and response a nowhere or a
nonphenomenal somewhere (61). For a fraction of time, the body is made to tremble,
unable to act or reflect. The body is at a higher or lower degree of spasmodic
passivity, until it is jolted back into action and reaction (61). What is usually
understood as emotion, what Massumi treats as the naming or narrating of affect,
restarts the circuit between action and reaction, stimulus and response as affect,
irreducible to emotion, folds back into the body. Both proprioception and
interoception allow the body to remember affectively, affording it what might be
called cellular memories or enfolded perspectives of the flesh (64).
Although proprioception, interoception and exteroception are ordinary aspects
of affective capacity, it is easy enough to see their relevance for traumatic experience.
It is precisely at a medium depth of the body that trauma sets in and sets out
to deliver its asubjective, nonobjective effects which shape the capacity of affect.
Like cultural theorists of affect, psychoanalysts are also rethinking bodily memory
but more often and more recently they take their cue from neuroscience. Reis, for
one, points to neuroscientific findings suggesting that there are various modes
of representation. In relation to trauma, Reis especially stresses those subsymbolic
processes which constitute memory in motoric, visceral, and sensory forms that
are understood as changing patterns of activation (n.d., 4).4

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It is in this context that Reis also gives a backward glance to Freud and his
treatments of unmodified mnemic residues of affective experience and neuronal
mnemic tracing that Freud connects to repetition in the session, a repetition of
action, or what might be better described as a repeated activation of affect that
is itself a means of bodily remembering (Reis n.d., 4). Like Freuds reminder to
analysts that the patient will repeat modes of reaction . . . right before our eyes,
Reis proposes that enactive witnessing involves the analysts receptivity to the
analysands living out traumatic experience in the consulting room (6). Here, the
analyst and the analysand are more bodies becoming in affect than they are beings
in (inter)personalization.
The relationship of psychoanalytic practice and enacting bodily memory that
Reis and others are elaborating looks back not only to Freuds various perspectives
on trauma, hysteria and transference but also to the troubled relationship of
psychoanalysis and the establishment of traumatic experiences verifiable historicity.
Ruth Leys takes up this troubled relationship and treats it as an oscillation between
what she refers to as mimetic and antimimetic tendencies that appear again and
again in the psychoanalytic theorizing of trauma (2000). Beginning with Freuds
writings and working through a number of psychoanalytic writers after Freud, Leys
assimilates to the mimetic that understanding of trauma as an experience that
shatters or disables the victims cognitive and perceptual capacities so that the
experience never becomes part of the ordinary memory system (298). Thus the
victim, rather than knowing, acts out or imitates the trauma. Leys contends that
there is a question raised about the veracity of the analysands testimony of
victimization, since as victim, the analysand is understood to have been absorbed
in or identified with the scene of victimization and therefore while not being able
to know, the analysand is open to suggestability in hypnosis or in a near hypnotic
relationship to the analyst. In contrast, the antimimetic tendency of psychoanalytic
theory of trauma often assumes that trauma comes from outside the victim who
usually is assumed to be a cognizing ego, but when in the experience of trauma
dissociates from the scene of victimization. Rather than being immersed, the victim
is distanced, suggesting that the victim can come to function in part like a spectator
to the scene of trauma and thus, when in psychoanalysis, as analysand, the victim
can come to remember the traumatic scene (299).
For Leys, the oscillation between the mimetic and the antimemitic tendencies,
characteristic of all efforts to theorize trauma, calls into question the possibility of
psychoanalytically curing trauma and thereby obtaining evidence to support one
theory of trauma or another; either the analysand and analyst will never be able to
verify the truth of their knowledge of the traumatic origin or the analysand will
not be able to successfully terminate the analysis, being unable to work out of the
near hypnotic relation with the analyst. But all of this rests on Leys insisting on
linking both psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytic cure with the possibility of
verifying the traumatic experience where this means the analysand, along with the
analyst, become able to turn the traumatic origin into a self representation and
narration (301). But psychoanalysts who are engaging with enactive witnessing are
not linking it to therapeutic ambitions of cure that make it possible to prove correct

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one theory or another. Indeed, they recognize and expect to enable the analysand to
recognize that no narration of a traumatic origin will be possible and therefore
enactive witnessing is not itself curative on narrative terms.
While there is language spoken in enactive witnessing, it is not aimed to the
linguistically oriented deconstruction and reconstruction of narratives; in enactive
witnessing, language is allowed to drop down or fall back to the medium depth of
the body, producing a deeper decomposition of meaning than the deconstruction
and reconstruction of narrative. Language becomes less about content and more
about the accompanying rhythms of affect the punctuated, pulsing beats in sound
moaning and groaning, or in the calming or agitating bodily gesture rocking,
rubbing, twisting, twitching and quivering. The affectivity shared by analyst and
analysand constitutes a nonphenomenal background, a pool of affective intensity
that, throughout the analysis, can draw analysand and analyst to preconscious
activation.
However, enactive witnessing may very well open up to an analysis of transference, engaging the analysand and the analyst in interpretation and the
deconstruction and reconstruction of narratives, especially familial ones to which
the trauma may be connected. But even then, the affectivity shared by analyst and
analysand through enactive witnessing will not be exhausted in the narration of
memory; affect is irreducible to narrative as is trauma. The movement from
witnessing and affect to narrative and the analysis of transference, therefore, can
only be tentative, by no means linear or irreversible, as it is marked by the
disjuncture between affect and narration. At any time, bodily irritation or affective
capacity can flood the narration. The analysis of transference is stalled, at least
temporarily, emptied of potential for ongoing interpretation and narration. Yet a
flood of affect can also start up analysis again, enliven again. To be with each other
again.
She sits in the chair unbearably alone. He is there but she can not see or hear him.
Her eyes are rigidly held turned from his face. And her own face is covered in tears of
shame. She feels that he has become uncaring and judgmental, the mistrusted other:
father and mother, but all the others too, abusive and terrifying. What can she do? What
can she do? She rocks to remember. She rocks looking for some other time, a time
before, when it seemed safe, seemed right, when there was light to hear, to see: when he
was there in his chair and she in hers. She rocks and holds her mind to the task of
turning back time just like she used to do in the apartment where she grew up. She rocks
and without consent, she cries out: she prays a prayer.

And even in this moment, moment after moment, moments of terrible confusion,
there is something being expressed, an expression of confusion become actuality.
The confusion breaks into her, breaks into the body, dropping her down into
severely debilitating doubt that now becomes nearly all that there is between them.
It is no less for him: uncertainty crowds the space, his face more closed, worried.
Nothing to do but to wait with her, sitting there, awaiting a turn to another time and
space of becoming together again. Awaiting that something the gift of an answer to
her prayer.
Suddenly and shockingly, she feels pressing against her chest in syncopation with the
beat of her heart, her hand curled in a soft fist pushing against the pain of cruelty mixed

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with sexual arousal and primordial need. She thinks he moves, turns his face, softer
around his eyes filled with something like fearful anticipation but care too. The beating
is slowing down, slowing down, slowing down and she can focus more on his being
there, his eyes to hers in between the beats. And hers back to his. Breathe and patience:
his and hers. They start again. To be with each other.

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Reflection IV
Becoming patient, a patient seeking and struggling to maintain contact with someone
who cares.5 This may not be an ideal figure of social, cultural or political agency but
it might well point to the figure of a body-in-affect befitting a neoliberal sociality.
Not only those at the bottom, as Lauren Berlant labels the children about whose
affect she writes, offering the shocking term, affective avarice, to capture their
behavioral economy (2007, 287). There are many more who seek contact and being
avarice of affect, hold on to sensations of aliveness as much as possible, setting up
living patterns in variously disciplined and controlled geographies of intimacy.
In this sense, as figure, the body-in-affect may point to the culmination in neoliberalism of the tension between the autological subject and the genealogic society, to
use Elizabeth Povinellis terms for the self-making of the sovereign subject in a
society that at the same time constrains and does so in part by intensifying the desire
of and for an autologic subjectivity (2006, 45). In a number of studies of affect that
have focused less on affect as preconscious, preindividual capacity and more on
named affective states, such feelings as shame, fear, joy, depression, have been linked
to the increasingly strained relation between the autologic subject and a neoliberal
society.6
What this tension brings into relief is the way in which the personal and cultural
traumas of these times are depleting the family of its affective resources and are
demanding more, if not too much, in way of affect, of other civil institutions, the
religious, the economic, the governmental, the educational and the occupational.
As result, the need to be with is pressuring the therapeutic process in all of these
institutions not to mention the institution of psychoanalysis itself. To reflect on the
psychoanalytic session and on the analysts and analysands production of an
affective background responsive to trauma, while primarily a site for reflecting on
affect and psychoanalysis, more generally points, as does affect studies, to method
and performance as a starting point for thinking in thought, thinking afresh about
how to be in and write about the multiple times and spaces of present day sociality.

Notes on contributor
Patricia Ticineto Clough is Professor of Sociology and Womens Studies at the
Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York. She is
author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000);
Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse (1994) and The End(s) of
Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is editor of The Affective
Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007). Clough is currently working on Ecstatic Corona

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an ethnographic historical research and experimental writing project about where

she grew up in Queens New York.

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Notes
1. Although I have not thematized the relationship of enactive witnessing and issues
of identity, such of those of gender, race, ethnicity or nation, it is not because there
is no such relationship but what that relationship is, or what race, gender, nation and
ethnicity are in terms of preconscious, preindividual bodily affect remains open for
further exploration.
2. I take this phrase and its meaning from G. Deleuzes Cinema 2: The Time Image (1989).
3. Reis draws on a number of works on trauma and psychoanalytic practices which lend to
his thinking about enactive witnessing. See: C. Caruth 1996; G. Boulanger 2007; D. Laub
1992; T. Ogden 1989; and W. Poland 2000.
4. Reis is drawing on the work of J.S. Bruner, R.R. Olver, and P.M. Greenfield 1966.
5. I am thinking here of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks text about her being in therapy, especially
her remarks about wanting to emerge as a patient, when she first visits Shannon, her
therapist (1999).
6. I am thinking of the work of Lauren Berlant 2006, 2007; Kathleen Stewart 2000, 2007;
Jose Esteban Munoz 2006; Sianne Ngai, 2005; and Ann Cvetkovich 2003.

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Reis, Bruce. n.d. Performative and enactive features of psychoanalytic witnessing: The
transference as scene of address. Unpublished manuscript.
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