You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Anna Freud was referring in particular to acting out when she discussed the fate of psychoanalytic concepts at the Twenty-Fifth Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in July 1967. Over the years certain concepts have been altered by their usage. As new clinical data are adduced, recognition of similarities results in the addition of seemingly related phenomena to those included in the original concept. Exquisitely precise and useful concepts, secure within the psychoanalytic setting from which they were derived, become overused, are split into subcategories, and are carried over into other fields and applied to other uses than those originally intended. Finally dilution and confusion reach such a point that the need for more precise definition is evident.
Definition, however, is not easy, and it is perhaps too much to expect that confusion will be eliminated. In this dilemma the developmental approach, the conceptual framework for the papers published in the monograph reviewed here, provides at least a helpful integration of the various behavioral manifestations usually included in the concept of acting out. To the papers of the symposium, first published in the January 1963 issue of the Journal of Child Psychiatry, the editor, Eveoleen Rexford, has added an extensive, though selective, summary of the important writings on the subject. This valuable review traces the repeated amplifications and revisions in the acting out concept from the time of Freud's first publications.
The development of every child, Rexford says, presents a case history of the evolution of impulse controls, the gradual mastery over direct instinctual expression under the influence of object relationships, maturing ego functions, and an increasing grasp of reality. So-called acting out behavior may occur transiently during one specific developmental phase, never to reappear, or may occur repetitively in response to specific life situations and unique interpersonal rel