ABSTRACT

The term "acting out" begins with a letter "a" because it's hardly a natural starting point for a general book on psychoanalysis. It's a notoriously imprecise idea and, unlike "anxiety" or "wish fulfilment", isn't much in circulation in the outside world. A decade or so later the concept of acting out comes up again in the technical papers, where Freud falls just short of representing the whole of analytic treatment as a battle against the patients' tendencies to act out. Elaborating on Freud's ideas about transference, Fenichel says that analysis itself, as well as encouraging transference, also inadvertently encourages acting out. The idea of acting out as a problem that has to be guarded against in analysis is brought out again by Otto Fenichel in his 1945 paper, "Neurotic Acting Out". A spell of acting out may be a sign of progress, although it may also present a danger if it isn't kept in check by the analyst.