On the Intersubjective Creation of Time and the Importance of Enactment: A Response to Chefetz and Bartlett

In this discussion of Dr. Chefetz’s and Dr. Bartlett’s responses (this issue, 2022), we further explore the inevitability of enactment in the process of treating dissociation in the face of relational trauma. Trauma, we propose, attacks human subjectivity by rapturing its being-in-time. Instead of being the creator of time, the subject finds himself doomed to be the object of time and living in the perpetuation of repetition compulsion. Paradoxically, it is only through repetition that one can break this time-loop and begin to feel and change his or her traumatic past. In the act of repetition, one subjugates the other (and reality as a whole) to his own frozen dissociations, yet with that very act also invites the other into his frozen experiences. When the other “accepts” the invitation, i.e., “answers” with an invitation of his or her own, an intersubjective encounter of frozen repetitions–a “dissociative third” - is created, which enables one to reclaim his or her own lost experiences and re-create his sense of time.