Acting Out: A Reconsideration of the Concept

I have discussed acting out to illustrate why it cannot be defined on empirical clinical grounds. Even when full recognition of whether or not unconscious fantasy as a factor is included in the definition, other clinical phenomena such as perversions or neurotic behaviour of other types must be included as well. I believe the problem with attempting a definition has been obscured by two main factors. The first is a conceptual confusion about the unconscious fantasy versus

the action components of acting out. The second is a tendency to ignore that the concept of acting out was devised in terms of the topographic rather than structural hypothesis. I have suggested the value of directing our attention to the nature of those processes involved in the ubiquitous travels by our patients to and fro across the frontier between introspection and action. There are advantages to distinguishing between the intrapsychic actualization of unconscious transference fantasy and motor action. The distinction frees us from the insoluble contradictions of a descriptive definition of acting out and makes it possible to approach acting out in the framework of metapsychology. The concept of acting out is confused if we isolate it from the integrally related concepts of working through and repetition in the psychoanalytic process. We can keep the important clinical problem of patients whose 'acting out' is conspicuous and central to their psychopathology as an unsolved aspect of the psychology of action. The artificial but heuristically advantageous distinction between actualization of unconscious transference fantasy and action allows us to understand better the vicissitudes of transference fantasies which may include tendencies to either or both actualization and action. Here we gain the clear advantage of viewing the phenomena of acting out as integrally linked to unconscious fantasies evoked by the emerging and evolving transference in the psychoanalytic process. The unconscious fantasy is here considered to be the central organizing structure of the transference in the sense of fantasy as a compromise formation in accordance with the principle of multiple function. The patient does not act out only to avoid remembering. Psychoanalysis can not take place without acting out any more than psychoanalysis could take place without transference. Acting out is the potential of the transference neurosis for actualization and therefore expresses the psychic reality of the transference.