ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that both concepts, acting out and enactment, should be preserved in the psychoanalytic literature. If acting out is the black sheep in psychoanalytic treatment, dreams have been from the very beginning the darlings of psychoanalysts. While the telling of a dream in analysis creates the possibility for the patient and the analyst to gain further understanding, acting out is the guardian of ignorance. The symbolic process that enables the subject to use his own dreams is pathologically affected. Dreams and other symbolic creations are produced in these analyses but cannot be used to generate insight. This represents a genuine symbolic impoverishment and greatly affects the creativity of those people who have achieved a moderate academic, professional, or artistic success. Dreams, though symbolically created, become the equivalent of acting out: the patient uses his dreams to contain the projections of parts of himself, in the same way that he used his external objects.
