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"Acting out" and sublimations are analytic concepts which have evolved pragmatically and acquired different meanings as the orientation of the psychoanalyst has changed. Acting out, described at first clinically and as a resistance, has been seen increasingly as a mode of ego functioning. Sublimations, on the other hand, were first considered metapsychologically and scarcely at all as clinical problems.
Common and contrasting features of these two reaction types are reviewed in the present paper. Both are seen as rooted in types of reality testing that reflect the success or failure of the secondary processes at different stages of development to gain ascendancy over the primary processes. Acting out takes as its model the early phase in which direct motor discharge is succeeded by object control as a method of reality testing; sublimations are associated with later phases in which intellectualization and symbol formations interpose barriers to the motor control of objects. Faults in identification dispose to acting out; successful identification strengthens internalizing and sublimating tendencies.