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More than 50 years ago, Sigmund Freud discussed acting out: “We may say that here [in analysis] the patient remembers nothing of what is forgotten and repressed but that he expresses it in action.” Freud then relates the acting to the repetition compulsion and continues: “As long as the patient is under treatment he never escapes from this compulsion to repeat; at last one understands that it is his way of remembering. … We soon perceive that the transference is itself only a bit of repetition and that the repetition is the transference of the forgotten past not only to the physician, but also on to all the other aspects of the current situation. We must be prepared to find, therefore, that the patient abandons himself to the compulsion to repeat, which is now replacing the impulse to remember not only in his relation with the analyst but also in all other matters occupying and interesting him at the time.” (6)
Freud emphasizes that acting out is intimately bound up with the transference which inevitably penetrates into all aspects of the patient's life. He also states clearly that we must recognize the reactivation of past experiences, which means acting out, as the method by which the patient remembers.
I fully accept Freud's views that this reactivation or acting out is a necessary part of any analysis and I propose to call this PARTIAL ACTING OUT to differentiate it from excessive or total acting out, which Freud discusses in the second part of the same paper. Here Freud states that acting out is related to the strength of the patient's resistances.
Melanie Klein extended Freud's work in her paper on the “Origins of the Transference”: “My conception of the transference as rooted in the earliest stages of development and in deeper layers of the unconscious is much wider and entails a technique by which from the whole material presented the unconscious elements of the transference are deduced; for instance, reports of patients about their everyday lives, relations an