The Interpretation of Action in Psychoanalysis

What psychoanalysts most apparently do is provide a locus for the spoken word, a place to recover the ancient magic of words, as Freud (1890) would have it. In our present times, where hyperactive multitaskers are the proposed models for imitation, our consulting rooms are perhaps the havens where it is still possible to pause and let the words come as if of their own will. Listening to one's own inner discourse is made easier for the analysand thanks to the listening offered by the analyst. The analysand's universe can therefore, at some point, seem to be lined by a broad if frail layer of words. Interlaced with one another, words then appear as if working their way toward covering the whole scene. Suddenly, however, the scene itself is on fire! Action bursts in, unpredictable and apparently unmanageable through the words that had seemed so useful and dominant just a few moments before. A salutary reminder that, for all their usefulness, words are effective in analysis possibly through borrowing their strength from the action they represent and which, in spite of appearances, had never been completely transmuted into representation. Words, after all, are a form of action.

To a naive spectator, psychoanalytic conversation around this sort of problem may at times seem to take a theological slant. In view of the preceding remarks, for instance, do we rather adhere to John's gospel which, in its opening, states that “in the beginning was the Word,” or to the Faustian verse cited by Freud in closing Totem and Taboo—“In the beginning there was action”? The question is anything but theoretical, since it concerns the practice of psychoanalysis in its most significant aspects, sometimes confronting the analyst with at once urgent and difficult choices. The international panel held at the 2009 Winter Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association addressed precisely that sort of problem.