Acting Out and the Analytic Alliance: A case report

The notion of acting out has a somewhat anomalous status in psychoanalysis, having been assigned several disjunctive meanings in the literature. Freud (1914) and Fenichel(1954) took the term to denote certain actions in analysis that corresponded to transference feelings. It followed that acting out was invariably translatable into verbalizable transference feelings, just as the gratification associated with the acting out of warded-off impulses was interchangeable with the gratification associated with the verbalization of these same feelings. Fenichel(1954) was explicit in assigning to acting out the function of memory-retrieval; it was in this context that he prescribed the immediate interpretation of acting out, contending that such interpretation fostered the creation of intrapsychic structure whereby the analysand could express verbally the memories and associated transference feelings being acted out. Blum(1976), one of the more recent explicators of acting out as an interpretable transference analogue, also recommends that acting out be met head-on with interpretive interventions aimed at converting such ego-syntonic behavior into “ego-dystonic symptomatic, behavior.” For Blum, as for Freud and Fenichel, it is axiomatic that acting out is verbally and transferentially representable; it is “the reenactment of transference that is not mediated through controlled speech in the analytic situation”(p.169). The analytic task, of course, is to offer interpretations that spur the analysand to undertake such mediation.

Since the '40s, analysts have significantly enlarged upon this “classical” viewpoint by pointing to varieties of acting out that do not correspond to id impulses (and derivative transference feelings) capable