Contribution to Symposium on Acting Out1

Acting out is a psychic phenomenon of a very complex nature, about which research workers are divided. The controversial points are connected with both the genesis of acting out and the field of conduct covered by the concept as well as with the existence or non-existence of some varieties of acting out.

We think that most analysts consider acting out as a process opposed to working through and insight. Why does working through fail and why is it that acting out is substituted for it? Different opinions exist on the genesis of acting out. For some authors acting out is due to the predominance of the death instinct expressed through envy, greed, and persecutory guilt, which provoke in the ego an insupportable tension. The ego cannot work through this tension mentally and looks for relief through immediate discharge using primitive mechanisms of defence such as denial, dissociation, projective identification, and omnipotence. This latter procedure can happen with the analyst (during the session) or with substitutes for the analyst through displacement (outside the session). By actualization we mean not only physical movement but speech too, whenever speech is used as a way of actualization and not of communication.

Following this line of thought, one of us made some observations in a recent paper on acting out in manic-depressive patients. The importance of mechanisms of denial and projective identification in the manic stage was stressed as a defence against envy of the idealized internal primary object, in an attempt to avoid insight into the deep oral envy and insupportable subjection to the idealized internal object. Manic activity constitutes then an acting out of feelings of envy towards the breast and other contents of the idealized mother. On the contrary, during the melancholic stage, acting out is essentially a defence against the overwhelming demands of the superego, because of the envious attacks on the idealized object. Thus there would be an act