Comments on a Common Form of Acting out

A report of three clinical instances demonstrates the use of well-defined, adverse reality situations as formidable defenses in psychoanalysis. The mobilization of infantile conflicts in the transference stimulated dramatization of repressed instinctual impulses. The repetition compulsion of past experiences, or their derivatives, was motivated by the hope of gaining gratification of persistent (ego-alien) infantile strivings (2). The displacement of the cathexis from the repressed memories to derivates

was economically in the service of attenuating the attendant anxiety, invoking defenses of rationalization to keep dangerous impulses in repression (1). The selection of rationalized acting out as the particular mode of resistance had its specific reason in each case and had to be analyzed as such, aside from its specific content. These patients interlaced their latent conflicts with situational exigencies which isolated those complexes from the analysis. As Glover has observed: 'When even for a short space of time the patient puts up an effective total resistance, we are nearest to the core of his conflicts' (3). The shift of the cathexis from the id to the domain of the ego was prompted by the latter's need of mobile re-enforcement to cope with the dynamic forces of the unconscious. The final convergence of the various specific defenses into action repeated regressively the historic pattern of mastering masochistic stimuli by motor activity.