The subject is social: The case of interpellation and enactment

Donnel Stern

Saturday Dec 14, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM, via zoom

Stern discusses the processes of interpellation and enactment in this session.

It is widely accepted in psychoanalysis today that the traditional emphasis on the individual person needs to be more fully integrated with the social. We need to attend to this problem in our theories of development, but perhaps even more in our theories of practice. After reviewing some of the many contributions in our literature to this project, I turn to the case of interpellation and enactment. Interpellation, a philosophical idea authored by Louis Althusser, is a way of conceptualizing the creation of subjectivity via individual participation in the tropes of power. Enactment, of course, is our psychoanalytic way of referring to unconscious participation in relatedness. In both, one person is “hailed” by another in a way that inducts the person so addressed, without the awareness of either party, into a relational pattern that includes both. Clinical process is illuminated by the recognition of the continuity of the social and the individual that is modeled by the relation of these these processes to one another.

CE Credits offered: 2

Course Objectives

After completing this course participants will be able to:

1. Define interpellation and enactment and apply them to our understanding of how individuals come to develop a sense of themselves.
2. Discuss ways our theories may need to be updated to include the unconscious social dimensions.

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