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Psychoanalysts take it for granted that once therapy has begun, clients should be prohibited or at least discouraged from “acting out” either within or between their sessions. Instead of taking action on the basis of any of their impulses, thoughts or feelings, clients are instructed to postpone them and put them into words. There are, of course, a number of sound theoretical as well as practical reasons for doing this, but these are so widely known that nothing would be served by repeating them here. Nevertheless, therapists who enforce this proscription too literally are likely to be acting out their own neurotic anxieties and countertransference resistances.
“One best protects the patient from disasters brought about by carrying his impulses into action,” Freud (1914) says, “by making him promise to form no important decisions affecting his life during the course of treatment, for instance, choice of a profession or of a permanent love-object, but to postpone all such projects until after recovery.” But Freud's motives for offering this advice are partially practical rather than purely analytic, since his avowed purpose is to protect patients from themselves, “until after recovery.”
“At the same time,” Freud goes on to say, “one willingly accords the patient all the freedom that is compatible with these restrictions,