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Enactment is a term used by psychologists and theorists that refers to an experiential or relational dynamic that is created, unwittingly, by unconscious forces. Perhaps the most significant hypothesis put forth by Freud is that a person is doomed to repeat what he or she does not remember. What Freud meant by this statement is that experience which is not represented by the mind nor emotionally worked through is sequestered in the unconscious. Once housed in the unconscious, the circumstances of an experience (e.g., the roles played by different persons involved, the specific elements of the interaction, the feeling states produced, and so on) are primed to be replayed or repeated, often years later, with remarkable similarity to the original event. The original event is enacted or, perhaps more accurately, re-enacted.

Freud emphasized the uncanny quality of how particular events and interpersonal transactions, often from very early in one’s life, become manifested again in contemporary life. And many patients present for treatment recognizing, and being startled by, scenarios in which they are currently embedded that are eerily like previous events in their lives. Some patients even say that they feel fated to ending up in the same and often detrimental situations or predicaments again and again, as if some religious or supernatural force is at work blocking their ability to enjoy more positive and fulfilling experiences.

What is perhaps the most disturbing element of enactments is that the repetition of experience defies conscious awareness and decision-making. It is often the case that unresolved emotional pain from one’s early development will be played out in adult life, even despite the best efforts of an individual who is actively and thoughtfully trying to avoid past circumstances and cultivate different ones.

For example, a woman who as a child was abandoned by the premature death of her father recognizes that in her adult life she tends to gravitate toward a series of professional situations and romantic partners that ultimately lead to her, yet again, experiencing abandonment, by a beloved manager who moves on to another company, a lover who leaves her for another woman, or the tragic death of her best friend who is killed in a car accident. Despite this woman’s best efforts, she cannot seem to shake the abandonment theme that has dominated her life.

Freud argued that repeated occurrences along similar thematic lines are not coincidental. He indicated, instead, that one’ current life is essentially pre-determined by one’s past. Freud theorized that a portion of emotional experience early in life is not represented psychically and, because of this, is directed into the unconscious as strings of traumatic material untethered to any central narrative or cohesive sense of self. The traumatic material cannot be integrated, resulting in a kind of fragmentation of one’s emotional and cognitive life.

For Freud, the mind re-creates experience, repeating what it does not remember, so that an individual has an opportunity to utilize the enactment for emotional integration and synthesis. By this I mean that the replay or facsimile of a painful or difficult experience in contemporary life ideally would allow a person to link it to the strings of related traumatic experience that lay dormant in the unconscious. Once this linking occurs, elements of the original event residing in the unconscious may be hooked and, just as in fishing, pulled to the surface for examination, integration and resolution.

This linking process is not easy and often does not occur spontaneously, not even in the actual occurrence of enactments. Most people need the help of a psychotherapist who creates an environment for the patient that facilitates a process by which contemporary structures of experience (the roles you always seem to find yourself in, the people you seem to gravitate toward and who gravitate toward you, the degree to which things work out for you or don’t, the feelings you generally feel, etc.) gradually become connected to previously unresolved material. As these connections solidify and gain clarity, the unrecognized aspects of prior experience are made visible. Often this is an emotionally painful process, but the result can be well worth it: a person’s awareness of and insight into the cause-effect dynamics that have shaped one’s life may be finally illuminated and utilized for change.