Panel on ‘Acting Out and/or Enactment’1

The moderator Rosine J. Perelberg welcomed the panel and audience. Setting a frame for the panel she raised the question, ‘Are acting out and enactment different or similar concepts?’ She briefly commented on Freud's view of acting out with regard to its transference manifestations and its being a way of remembering through repeating.

Maria Ponsi, the first panellist, approached the topic by posing the question, ‘Do these concepts have a distinctive place or is one of the two terms preferred to the detriment of the other?’ She noted that with a radical paradigm shift based on a relational, two-person perspective the concepts of enactment and acting out have grown apart in meaning. She defined the term ‘acting out’ as an actualisation of an impulse through motoric action, embedded in classical drive theory and a one-person psychology. The term ‘enactment’ theoretically referred to a two-person interpersonal episode and reflected the analyst's inevitable subjectivity and participation. It was seen as an opportunity rather than viewed as an obstacle to analysis.

Her patient who had been in analysis for two years called at the weekend to ask if her analyst would agree to the patient's decision to come to a party the next day where they would both attend. Not able to cover her astonishment Ponsi told the patient, ‘I can't understand the meaning of this sudden request since we have never talked about this during the sessions’. On the phone, the patient stated that she hadn't even broached the topic as she felt it was inappropriate to attend the party. She unilaterally reasoned it was OK to go, even wanted to analyse the decision, but it would slip her mind. She was calling to see if her analyst had any objections to her going. Ponsi was troubled by the phone call and aware of an authoritative role being projected on to her as well as the patient's need to deprive her of it. She felt the patient had imposed complicity ‘in which rules are respected in appearance, but not in e