Concept
Acting out
The expression in action, rather than in remembering and words, of unconscious wishes, fantasies or memories stirred up by the treatment, whether in the sessions or in the patient's life outside them. Freud, who called it Agieren, saw it as a repetition that takes the place of remembering and so works as a resistance within the transference. Later analysts disagreed over how far it should be curbed or put to use, and attention to the analyst's own part in such action led to the notion of enactment.
Development
1905
Sigmund Freud introduced by
In the postscript to the Dora case Freud first uses 'agieren' for the patient's breaking off the treatment: taking revenge on him as she had wanted to on Herr K., she acted out a piece of her memories and fantasies instead of reproducing it in the treatment.
1912
Sigmund Freud developed by
In the technical papers Freud places acting out within the transference: the unconscious impulses seek to be reproduced rather than remembered, the patient wants to act on them in the relation to the analyst, and the treatment must bring them back to remembering and psychic working over.
1924
Sándor Ferenczi reworked by
With Rank, Ferenczi reverses the weighting of Freud's 'Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through' (1914), which treated the wish to relive in place of remembering as resistance: what cannot be remembered can only be repeated in the treatment, so repetition, actively encouraged and then turned into present memory, is given the main role in technique.
1924
Otto Rank reworked by
With Ferenczi, Rank reverses the weighting of Freud's 'Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through' (1914), which treated the wish to relive in place of remembering as resistance: what cannot be remembered can only be repeated in the treatment, so repetition, actively encouraged and then turned into present memory, is given the main role in technique.
Relations
- 1905 introduced by Sigmund Freud
In the postscript to the Dora case Freud first uses 'agieren' for the patient's breaking off the treatment: taking revenge on him as she had wanted to on Herr K., she acted out a piece of her memories and fantasies instead of reproducing it in the treatment.
- 1912 developed by Sigmund Freud
In the technical papers Freud places acting out within the transference: the unconscious impulses seek to be reproduced rather than remembered, the patient wants to act on them in the relation to the analyst, and the treatment must bring them back to remembering and psychic working over.
- 1924 reworked by Sándor Ferenczi
With Rank, Ferenczi reverses the weighting of Freud's 'Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through' (1914), which treated the wish to relive in place of remembering as resistance: what cannot be remembered can only be repeated in the treatment, so repetition, actively encouraged and then turned into present memory, is given the main role in technique.
- 1924 reworked by Otto Rank
With Ferenczi, Rank reverses the weighting of Freud's 'Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through' (1914), which treated the wish to relive in place of remembering as resistance: what cannot be remembered can only be repeated in the treatment, so repetition, actively encouraged and then turned into present memory, is given the main role in technique.
Works
- 1905
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Freud's case history of "Dora", an eighteen-year-old Viennese woman (later identified as Ida Bauer) whom he treated for about eleven weeks at the end of 1900; written in 1901, it appeared in 1905 in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. Dora suffered from a nervous cough, loss of voice, shortness of breath and low moods, and her father brought her to Freud after her parents found a letter in which she hinted at suicide. Behind the symptoms Freud uncovers a family entanglement: her father's affair with Frau K., and the advances of Frau K.'s husband, Herr K., whom Dora slapped after a proposal by a lake and whose earlier kiss had filled her with disgust. Freud reads her symptoms as the expression of repressed sexual wishes — love for Herr K., a revived childhood attachment to her father and, at the deepest layer, love for Frau K. — and builds the case around the interpretation of two dreams: a burning house from which her father rescues her while her mother wants to save her jewel case, and a wandering through a strange town after her father's death. Dora broke off the treatment on 31 December. In the Postscript Freud attributes the failure to his not having recognised and interpreted in time the transference of her feelings for Herr K. onto himself, and gives his first sustained account of transference as a new edition of old impulses directed at the physician.
- 1915
Observations on Transference-Love
"Observations on Transference-Love" is the third of Freud's "Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis", published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse in 1915. It takes up a situation that Freud counts among the only really serious difficulties of analytic work: a woman patient declares that she has fallen in love with her analyst. Freud sets aside the layman's solutions, marriage, an end to the treatment or a secret affair, and argues that the analyst must neither return the love nor suppress it with moral appeals or demands for renunciation. The love is induced by the analytic situation, not by the analyst's personal qualities, a fact that should warn him against his own countertransference. It breaks out as a resistance, often just when a painful memory is drawing near; yet resistance does not create it, but finds it already present, exploits it and exaggerates it. Freud lays down the rule that the treatment must be carried out in abstinence: the patient's need and longing are to be left in place as forces that drive the work, not stilled by substitutes. The analyst holds on to the transference-love but treats it as something unreal, to be traced back to its unconscious and infantile origins, so that the patient can reveal her conditions for loving and the phantasies bound up with them. He then asks whether such love is genuine, and answers that it is: like all love it repeats infantile prototypes, and it differs from ordinary love only in being provoked by the analytic situation, intensified by resistance and heedless of reality. Because the analyst called it forth by beginning the treatment, he may draw no personal advantage from it, and here ethical and technical reasons coincide. The paper ends by likening the analyst to a chemist who works with explosive forces, and by defending psychoanalysis at full strength against milder methods.
- 1924
The Development of Psychoanalysis
Entwicklungsziele der Psychoanalyse (1924; in English, The Development of Psychoanalysis, 1925) is a short programmatic book by Sándor Ferenczi and Otto Rank, issued as the first number of Freud's series Neue Arbeiten zur ärztlichen Psychoanalyse. According to its preface, it grew out of conversations in the summer of 1922: Ferenczi drafted the critical part and Rank the positive section on the analytic situation. The two revised the whole together after Freud, at the Berlin congress of September 1922, set a prize question on how analytic technique and theory had influenced each other. They adapted the text to that question but withdrew from the competition. The book argues that psychoanalysis had grown from a therapeutic procedure into a vast body of theory while its technique lagged behind, leaving many analysts disoriented and too closely bound to Freud's few technical papers. Starting from Freud's "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through" (1914) and the repetition compulsion of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the authors give repetition, rather than remembering, the leading role in treatment: the decisive unconscious material was never conscious, so it can only be reproduced in the relation to the analyst, where it must be understood and turned into present memory. Rank's section describes analysis as a time-limited process of libidinal flow, set going and carried by transference. The analyst stays largely passive and intervenes, like a catalyst, where resistance marks a neurotic deviation. Ego resistances give way to a transference in which the clinical neurosis is converted into a transference neurosis that revives the Oedipal "primal neurosis". Frustration keeps affects from discharging prematurely and drives the libido back to its points of fixation. A final phase of "weaning" dissolves the transference, and for it the analyst sets a fixed end date. Abreaction remains the healing agent, but its affects now run their course in the relation to the analyst rather than being tied to recovered memories. Ferenczi's historical-critical section reviews techniques that had stalled at earlier stages of psychoanalytic knowledge: collecting associations, dictionary-like translation of symbols, symptom analysis, "complex analysis", mechanically uncovering the stages of libido theory, speculative, phylogenetic and anagogic interpretation, lecturing patients, calling every stall a resistance, and both rigid passivity and "wild activity". It names the analyst's own narcissism as a source of error, and holds that the unconscious proper, never experienced, can only be relived piecemeal in the present, as a "fractionated catharsis". A chapter on theory and practice distinguishes intellectual knowledge from conviction gained through experience, and presents Freud's work as a "circulus benignus" in which each corrects the other. The authors see psychoanalysis moving from a phase of knowledge (Erkenntnisphase) to a phase of experience (Erlebnisphase). They conclude that a training analysis should not differ from a therapeutic one, that the patient's excess of knowledge should give way to the analyst's greater knowledge, and that technique will grow simpler, perhaps even readmitting hypnosis and suggestion, while psychoanalytic knowledge becomes common to all physicians and to therapists who are not physicians. Published in the same year as Rank's The Trauma of Birth, the book became a point of contention within Freud's inner circle.
See also
References
- Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria1905 Evidence for a relation
- Observations on Transference-Love1915 Evidence for a relation
- The Dynamics of Transference1912 Evidence for a relation
- The Development of Psychoanalysis1924 Evidence for a relation