"Acting in" is a psychological term which has been given various meanings over the years, but which is most generally used in opposition to acting out to cover conflicts which are brought to life inside therapy, as opposed to outside.
One commentator, noting the variety of usages, points out that it is often "unclear whether 'in' refers to the internalization into the personality, to the growth in insight, or to the acting within the session". [1]
With respect to patients, the term 'acting in' has been used to refer to the process of a client/patient bringing an issue from outside the therapy into the analytic situation, and acting upon it there. [2]
The therapist is advised to respond to the issue immediately to prevent further and more disruptive acting in. [3]
Hanna Segal distinguished positive acting in from destructive acting in - both being aimed however at affecting the analyst's state of mind, whether to communicate or to confuse. [4]
The term was used in 1957 by Meyer A. Zeligs to refer specifically to the postures taken by analysts in a psychoanalytic session. [5]
Psychoanalysis also describes as 'acting in' the process whereby the analyst brings his or her personal countertransference into the analytic situation - as opposed to the converse, the acting out of the patient's transference. [6]
The result is generally agreed to produce a chaotic analytic situation which hampers therapeutic progress. [7]
The term was used rather differently however by Carl Whitaker in the 60's, so as to refer to the technique whereby therapists increase their involvement in a session in such a way as to ramp up the patient's anxiety for therapeutic ends. [8]
Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques related to the study of the unconscious mind, which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, who retained the term psychoanalysis for his own school of thought, and stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions, mostly by students of Freud, such as Alfred Adler and his collaborator, Carl Gustav Jung, as well as by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion DSO was an influential British psychoanalyst, who became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965.
Sándor Ferenczi was a Hungarian psychoanalyst, a key theorist of the psychoanalytic school and a close associate of Sigmund Freud.
Countertransference is defined as redirection of a psychotherapist's feelings toward a client – or, more generally, as a therapist's emotional entanglement with a client.
Transference is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which the feelings a person has about their parents, as one example, are unconsciously redirected or transferred onto the therapist. It usually concerns feelings from a primary relationship during childhood. At times, this transference can be considered inappropriate. Transference was first described by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, who considered it an important part of psychoanalytic treatment.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy or psychoanalytic psychotherapy is a form of depth psychology, the primary focus of which is to reveal the unconscious content of a client's psyche in an effort to alleviate psychic tension.
Projective identification is a term introduced by Melanie Klein and then widely adopted in psychoanalytic psychotherapy.
In the psychology of defense mechanisms and self-control, acting out is the performance of an action considered bad or anti-social. In general usage, the action performed is destructive to self or to others. The term is used in this way in sexual addiction treatment, psychotherapy, criminology and parenting. In contrast, the opposite attitude or behaviour of bearing and managing the impulse to perform one's impulse is called acting in.
Harold Frederic Searles was one of the pioneers of psychiatric medicine specializing in psychoanalytic treatments of schizophrenia. Harold Searles has the reputation of being a therapeutic virtuoso with difficult and borderline patients; and of being, in the words of Horacio Etchegoyen, president of the IPA, "not only a great analyst but also a sagacious observer and a creative and careful theoretician".
Resistance, in psychoanalysis, refers to oppositional behavior when an individual's unconscious defenses of the ego are threatened by an external source. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalytic theory, developed his concept of resistance as he worked with patients who suddenly developed uncooperative behaviors during sessions of talk therapy. He reasoned that an individual that is suffering from a psychological affliction, which Freud believed to be derived from the presence of suppressed illicit or unwanted thoughts, may inadvertently attempt to impede any attempt to confront a subconsciously perceived threat. This would be for the purpose of inhibiting the revelation of any repressed information from within the unconscious mind.
Regression, according to psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, is a defense mechanism leading to the temporary or long-term reversion of the ego to an earlier stage of development rather than handling unacceptable impulses in a more adaptive way. The defense mechanism of regression, in psychoanalytic theory, occurs when an individual's personality reverts to an earlier stage of development, adopting more childish mannerisms.
Identification is a psychological process whereby the individual assimilates an aspect, property, or attribute of the other and is transformed wholly or partially by the model that other provides. It is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified. The roots of the concept can be found in Freud's writings. The three most prominent concepts of identification as described by Freud are: primary identification, narcissistic (secondary) identification and partial (secondary) identification.
Psychoanalytic dream interpretation is a subdivision of dream interpretation as well as a subdivision of psychoanalysis pioneered by Sigmund Freud in the early twentieth century. Psychoanalytic dream interpretation is the process of explaining the meaning of the way the unconscious thoughts and emotions are processed in the mind during sleep.
Modern psychoanalysis is the term used by Hyman Spotnitz to describe the techniques he developed for the treatment of narcissistic disorders.
Body-centred countertransference involves a psychotherapist's experiencing the physical state of the patient in a clinical context. Also known as somatic countertransference, it can incorporate the therapist's gut feelings, as well as changes to breathing, to heart rate and to tension in muscles.
Joseph J. Sandler was a British psychoanalyst within the Anna Freud Grouping – now the Contemporary Freudians – of the British Psychoanalytical Society; and is perhaps best known for what has been called his 'silent revolution' in re-aligning the concepts of the object relations school within the framework of ego psychology.
Robert Joseph Langs was a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, the author, co-author, and editor of more than forty books on psychotherapy and human psychology. Over the course of more than fifty years, Langs developed a revised version of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, currently known as the “adaptive paradigm”. This is a distinctive model of the mind, and particularly of the mind’s unconscious component, significantly different from other forms of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Abstinence or the rule of abstinence is the principle of analytic reticence and/or frustration within a clinical situation. It is a central feature of psychoanalytic theory – relating especially to the handling of the transference in analysis.
Parallel process is a phenomenon noted between therapist and supervisor, whereby the therapist recreates, or parallels, the client's problems by way of relating to the supervisor. The client's transference and the therapist's countertransference thus re-appear in the mirror of the therapist/supervisor relationship.
Patrick Casement is a British psychoanalyst and author of multiple books and journal articles on contemporary psychoanalytic technique. He has been described as a pioneer in the relational approaches to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy by Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology. His book 'Learning from Our Mistakes' received a Gradiva award for its contribution to psychoanalysis, and his book 'Learning Along the Way: Further Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy' was listed in the top 100 psychotherapy books of all time by Bookauthority.
