You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Acting-out Behavior in psychotherapy is invariably considered an intrusion into the treatment. It complicates the psychoanalytic or therapeutic process, brings extraneous people or society into it, and diverts necessary psychic energy to the outside environment. Psychoanalysts attempt to control or limit it by forbidding or mitigating major social or economic decisions such as marriage, divorce, or a new business merger, during certain phases of the analytic process, and all psychotherapists are on the watch for it. Indeed, it has often appeared to me that acting-out constituted a considerable part of the phobic countertransference structure which some of us fall heir to in this critical work of ours.
The patient quickly comes to know that the psychotherapist apparently is little interested in his life outside of the therapy hours, and that the therapist may even see this life as an obstacle to treatment! The psychotherapist considers neurosis a conflict between intrapsychic elements which must be worked through in his office between the participants and nowhere else. If this is overstating the situation, I can only allow as an exception “a grudging recognition that the patient does something after he leaves the hour but what he does is not clear and furthermore there is not the time to find out.” If the patient lives rather than thinks out his conflicts—I call this molar behavior—then the psychotherapist must convert the behavioral acts into their psychic equivalents, so that they become manageable and manipulatable in the treatment.
Unfortunately, this state of affairs has created some problems of its own. For example, Stierlin1 brings up the problem of how analytic insight is converted to life insight and postulates a “creative dialectic” between conscious thinking and unconscious affective life to take care of it. Fingarette2 mentions that the Freudian “wish” is tantamount to the act, for the guilt from a “wish” and ‘“act” is held to be identical. We, of course, a