Acting out can be looked upon as one of
the defense mechanisms by which the unconscious protects itself against being
uncovered by the ego. In therapy acting out can be viewed as one of the
borderline defenses. Based on the Vaillant classification, this defense
mechanism is part of the Immature Defenses category.
Acting Out Defense Mechanism
Explanation
There are many
possible definitions of "acting out". In brief, you may define that as
particular behavior, leading to the actions instead of experiencing the
corresponding feeling. In the broadest sense, we talk about acting out when a person
unconsciously uses action or any non-verbal communication or psychosomatic
symptom instead of getting in touch with his true feelings, instead of
acknowledging to himself and putting into words what he really feels and
experiences inside himself.
Therefore, acting
out is performing an extreme behavior in order to express thoughts or feelings
the person feels incapable of otherwise expressing. Instead of saying, “I’m
angry with you,” a person who acts out may instead throw a book at the person,
or punch a hole through a wall. When a person acts out, it can act as a
pressure release, and often helps the individual feel calmer and peaceful once
again. For instance, a child’s temper tantrum is a form of acting out when he
or she does not get his or her way with a parent.
Acting out is
a hidden manifestation of destructive anger. Perhaps the most dangerous form of
destructive anger is one, that is not experienced as anger or any feeling at
all, but is acted out instead. The repressed, unrecognized, destructive anger
can turn also against the self and appear in many different guises. Self-injury
may also be a form of acting-out, expressing in physical pain what one cannot
stand to feel emotionally. The person might suffer from psychosomatic symptoms,
become accident-prone, attempt suicide, or commit unconscious acts of
self-sabotage or destruction in relationships, in his work, and so on.
In a way, “Acting
out” literally means acting out the desires that are forbidden by the Super ego
and yet desired by the Id. We thus cope with the pressure to do what we believe
is wrong by giving in to the desire.
A person who
is acting out desires may do it in spite of their conscience or may do it with
relatively little thought. Thus, the act may be being deliberately bad or may
be thoughtless wrongdoing.
Where the
person knows that they are doing wrong, they may seek to protect themselves
from society's eyes by hiding their action. They may also later fall into using
other coping mechanisms such as Denial to protect themselves from feelings of
shame.
More on Definition
Under Freudian/psychoanalytic terms "acting
out" is seen as a dichotomy between the conscious and the unconscious
wanting to both send out a repressed message.
In psychoanalysis, the term "acting out" has
misconceptions related to it. People have given the term the broader meaning of
someone throwing a tantrum, or verbally expressing pent up emotion. In reality,
Freudian psychoanalysis specifies that acting out is much more subtle than
that: the client who acts out clearly unconsciously expresses a repressed,
unremembered something with actions rather than with inaccessible words, and
such actions are intrinsically woven within the psychoanalytical situation. In
psychoanalysis, acting out has a lot of communicative potential because it
sends signs that will indicate to a therapist the client's repressed,
unrecallable memories.
Freud first used the term in 1914 in "Remembering,
Repeating, and Working-Through". As Freud defines it, acting out is when
patients cannot access repressed memories that motivate unconscious behaviors
that "symbolically dramatize the past in order not to remember
it". Acting out during therapy, as described by Freud, includes such
things as behaving toward the therapist as they behaved toward parents, having
disturbing dreams and associations, complaining of lack of success because of a
childhood "deadlock" in the Oedipal stage, etc. Therapists might
also, perhaps simplistically and erroneously, suggest acting out pertains to
all the changes in affect and gesture that the patient goes through as he or
she talks about themselves.
These include:
* Intonation changes
* Facial expressions
* Eye movement
* Change in tone of voice
(volume)
* Imitation (remembering a
mother's shrieking voice and repeating it)
* Body language-use of
hands and excited speech, or withdrawn
Acting out is different from "acting in," which
occurs outside the bounds of therapy sessions, for example in work or love
decisions. Acting out it consists of unconscious messages expressed through
behavior in the therapy transference relationship.
Example
A good example
would be an overworked and underpaid worker who slaved all night to finish a
project and when he placed it on his boss’s desk, the only thing his taskmaster
had to say was “Well, it’s about time!” On his way back to his desk, the worker
mutters under his breath “That SOB!.” He then enters the washroom and begins to
wash his hands. He washes, and washes…and washes. He washes until his hands
turn red and blister, but he continues to wash. He is not aware of it, but he
seems to engage in this compulsion whenever he feels bad inside for thinking
ill about another. That is not right, after all. On the one hand, he wants to
tell his boss where to go. On the other hand, he’s grateful to have a job and he
has been taught well that bearing ill feelings toward another is the work of
the Devil. He feels so unclean when he “slips” and says those hateful things
under his breath. His compulsion is an instance of displaying through an action
the conflict that rages within him. It helps relieve the anxiety he feels to
some degree, but it does not really solve the problem. Yet it gives him enough
relief that he does this over and over again in similar situations, with no
insight into the “dynamics” of the situation.
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