ABSTRACT
“Listening” to the communicative value of “acting in” takes technical precedence over underscoring its resistance potential. Analytic pioneers following Sigmund Freud continued to address the significance of communication via action. The former perspective refers to the patient’s putting his transference fantasies into actions rather than words and is therefore a “new and improved” form of M. A. Zeligs’s “acting in” concept. The spoken words then acquire the status of actions and these actions need to be listened to even more carefully than the words that embody them. Listening to the action that the patient was performing while setting up an appointment helped clarify and document the hypothesis that was evolved during the interview itself. Phases of treatment especially demand caution and it is better that the analyst restrict his or her interpretation to the “experience-near” and contextually immediate aspects of the patient’s action.
