Discussion of Herbert A. Rosenfeld's Article, The Need of Patients to Act Out During Analysis

Dr. Rosenfeld calls attention to two different types of acting out described by Freud. The differentiation is indeed important and deserves more attention than it usually receives. However, the comparison here suggested between “partial” and “total” (excessive) acting out does not seem especially felicitous in conveying the essence of the distinction—at least from Freud's point of view.

“Partial” acting out, which might perhaps better be designated as “primary acting out,” occurs spontaneously not only in neurotic but in normal persons, as Freud came to recognize.1 “Total” (or secondary) acting out, like the transference neurosis to which it belongs, is in part an artifact produced by regression, resistance and other features of the analytic situation. It is therefore not necessarily the case, as we might suppose from Dr. Rosenfeld's nomenclature, that in the one instance a memory is partly recalled in action and in the other totally recalled. One might even expect the opposite, since the original neurosis cannot always be transformed into a transference neurosis, while the latter is already in the process of being verbalized. Actually, memories, in the course of analysis, undergo a piecemeal emergence that involves alternations between acting out and verbalization as interrelated parts of the same process. These therefore bear a complementary as well as an antagonistic relationship to each other.

There are also functional differences between spontaneous (partial, primary) and

treatment-induced (total, secondary) acting out, just as there are between spontaneous and treatment-induced dreams. The development of the one is related to adaptation in everyday life and to realistic as compared to unrealistic action; the other is related to the analytic setting and conformity with the fundamental rule. The meaning of “excessive” acting out would have to va