ABSTRACT
By ‘acting out’ one means any external behaviour or act motivated by the transference relationship with the analyst. As Freud pointed out, it is a way of remembering by repeating acts instead of recalling them and communicating them in verbal and symbolic language. It is a past that never ceased to be the past. On many occasions, acting out implies recalling, in a continuous present, something that was never a part of the past at all: it is to present the same story, over and over again, on a stage where a drama of the past is unfolding. Acting out is a defence against confusional anxieties. The repetition of acting out may indicate that the therapist has been able to detect an important point. At other times the repetition of acting out forms part of the learning system, as in the case of some neurotic adolescents.
