Acting out-Tranference and Countertransference - Research Paper Example

The notion of acting out has been imposed with various orientations and connotations. The thirty-year old precise definition, which was thought to be a rightful and analyzable form of resistance, has now been extended to make room for delinquent behaviors and pathological and impulsive actions. The expression is now used by various psychoanalysts and others to include a variety of antisocial, impulsive and unsafe actions, often without keeping in mind the context in which the action arose. It is also sometimes used in derogatory sense to indicate dissatisfaction in the actions of patients.

The present puzzlement around the phenomenon basically starts from the time when Sigmund Freud translated the term. In 1901, Freud used the informal term handeln meaning ‘to act’ to describe faulty actions, which according to him had unconscious importance. However, in 1905, he used a less informal term, agieren which also meant ‘to act’, but with a more forceful connotation. Freud initiated the expression in agieren as ‘Remembering, repeating and working through’ (1914). Agieren was then translated as ‘acting out’ and it is most likely that it is the translation that had lead to uncertainty in the psychological literature.

Acting out basically refers to the release through actions, rather than verbalization, of conflicted mental substance. Even though there is a difference between act and word, both types of liberations are answers to a return of the repressed; repeated in the case of actions and remembered in the case of words. Another difference sometimes drawn is between acting out and acting in, used to differentiate between actions that occur outside the psychoanalytical treatment and actions that take place within treatment.

The concept of acting out is strongly related to the theory of the transference and its advancement. Even though Freud treated the transference as the source of acting out and as a hindrance to the treatment