Chapter 9 Acting Out and Separation Anxiety

‘Les hommes, dit le petit prince, ils s’enfournent dans des rapides, mais ils ne savent plus ce qu’ils cherchent. Alors ils s’agitent et tournent en rond…’

‘You know’, said the Little Prince, ‘people throng into express trains, but then they forget what they are looking for. Then they get excited and go round in circles…’

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, p. 80

This chapter is concerned with the close links between separation anxiety and acting out. I should point out that I am here using the term ‘acting out’ in its original sense, as defined by Laplanche and Pontalis (1967:4), without distinguishing between acting in and acting out as some authors have done. While there is a relatively substantial body of psychoanalytic literature on the various aspects of acting out, contributions on acting out as a manifestation of separation anxiety are far less numerous considering how common this phenomenon is. This is surprising, as clinical experience shows that the frequency of acting out increases particularly at the time of between-session, weekend and holiday breaks, and especially in the event of an unforeseen interruption such as a missed session.

I believe that the relationship between separation, acting out and transference is so obvious and familiar to us psychoanalysts that most of us are accustomed to interpret it in our practice without paying attention to certain technical and theoretical aspects of these phenomena.

Analysts, after all, conventionally interpret acting out as a sign of the emergence of the repressed and, when it occurs in relation to the transference, as ‘a basic refusal to acknowledge this

transference’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967:4), but they disregard its timing. If account is taken of the timing, acting out proves, by virtue of its intensity and frequency, to be one of the principal manifestations of separation anxiety in the treatment.

For this reason, every instance of acting out, being closely bound up with interruptions