Acting Through Speech

This notion is related to the complex issue of Agieren raised by Freud (1914a) in “Remembering, repeating and working-through”. By indicating that transference repetition could be “enacted” in the session, Freud offered the investigation of the unconscious a new “royal path”. Acted repetition manifests itself in particular at the very heart of speech, the speaker being unaware that he is repeating and also of what he is repeating. It is listening that detects this acting through speech (agir de parole), while the subject believes he is saying only what he wants to say.

This enunciation must be distinguished from one in which the patient speaks directly to the analyst, for example to tell the latter about his fear of being judged, criticised or rejected. In this case, speech is simply making explicit a transference displacement in which the analyst takes the place of an object of the past.

Acting though speech takes on an entirely different form. Certain enunciations that emerge unexpectedly at the beginning of analyses, and that may make one doubt the indication, make it possible to illustrate acting through speech in a way that is almost a caricature. Here are two examples:

A female patient, addressing the analyst directly, said: “I hope that you won't take this badly, but you look a bit odd.”

A male patient punctuated the end of each of his sentences with, “Okay?”

In both cases, the analyst was surprised and even slightly taken aback by the incongruous nature of these formulations which openly “flout” the spirit of the fundamental rule. He felt a bit irritated and was tempted to correct what amounted to a misunderstanding, a typically countertranferential response in the form of counteracting through speech. On reflection, the analyst realised that such acting through speech corresponds to deep issues revealing archaic modes of functioning: need for control, demand for symmetry, and an ingenuous use of projection. Speech is then cut off from any metaphorical resonance