Frederick S. Perls (En.)

Frederick S. Perls

Acting Out vs. Acting Through

Frederick S. Perls and Cooper C. Clements

Fritz: Before you ask questions I want to say something about "acting out"

in general.

This term, acting out, takes me back to the time when I was psychoanalyst,

and where acting out was a bad thing.

Freud's rigid demand was, "You should not act out, but remember instead".

In his preoccupation with the past, Freud said people should remember

instead of acting out.

But this idea, in my opinion, was that they should be aware and have enough

distance from this way of living so that they could work on it.

They should be, in Freudian terms, more conscious of what they were doing.

In a way, Freud's idea was correct. He believed that people lived certain

neurotic attitudes and by living them and acting them out,

they escaped treatment.

Now in gestalt therapy when we talk about "acting out" we do not mean

living out but "Be an actor".

We have a script in the form of a dream or a fantasy.

We see that the dream or fantasy is a story, a drama, and we act it out again

in therapy to make us more aware of what we are, of what is available.

Cooper: And this is acting out the role in the therapy situation.

Fritz: Exactly. So the trouble lies partly on a semantic level.

The acting out idea of Freud should say, "Be aware that you act out a role".

But instead a taboo was presented by Freud as, "You should not act out

because it is a bad thing".

Now in Freudian therapy you don't bring this into the therapy, and so maybe

the prohibition makes sense.

Cooper: In gestalt therapy you are aiming for conscious awareness of

the acted out roles?

Fritz: Exactly. The difference between us and Freud is that he stressed

remembering and we stress being aware.

We stress the difference between 'deliberate acting' and being unaware

of living in a certain way.

The latter is living a part of one's life script and doing it compulsively,

without knowing that it is a pathological way of living.

I want to emphasize that in Freudian terminology acting out is a dirty word.

And many things are then covered as 'acting out' and a taboo is put on

things which might just as well be a genuine expression of the personality.

Freud's idea was that everything is predetermined and whatever happens

is just a repetition of something that happened before.

In other words, this Freudian analysis does not leave room for creative living

because if everything happened before, it's an automatic repetition.

Again this might often be the case so far as the Freudian type of acting out

is concerned.

Cooper: So we want to look ahead to what is authentic living,

in addition to the process of getting out of the neurosis.

Fritz: My opinion is this: Any unfinished situation, any incomplete action,

will come to the surface and will be or wants to be completed.

Now much of what Freud called "the repetition compulsion"

(compulsive repetitiveness) is the unfinished situation.

Freud thought this is just maybe a habit formation, a petrified way of living.

And I maintain it's just the other way around.

These compulsive repetitions, the living out of something in a very similar way,

are our attempts (futile attempts in most cases) to solve the situation.

This is because very often something is left out in this acting out:

there is something one is not yet aware of it.

Cooper: This would bring in the avoiding part.

There's always some avoiding.

Fritz: Yes, yes.

Cooper: It's a crucial element. And then you try to get at this,

particularly in dream work and body language work?

Fritz: I don't try to get to this. The organism get to this, and whether it gets

to this in the form of acting out or dreaming out - perhaps poetrying out - it is

just a matter of chance the way this person expresses himself.

To talk in old-fashioned words, the extrovert would rather live it out and the

introvert would make a poor piece of poetry out of it.

But in both cases it points to some arresting in one's development by avoiding

taking a certain step, taking a certain risk.

Cooper: So you would related it to the general thing of a person trying to

experience and express himself?

Fritz: Look, consider a cat which plays and climbs up a curtain and uses its

claws. When the cat is young it cannot avoid using the claws.

Claw-using is unfinished business for the young cat; so it does not "act out" at

this moment clawing you. Now if a grown-up cat would always use the claws,

would act out the claw bit, then something is missing in its development.

The moment that it learns to walk without using the claw, then differentiation

has taken place.

Cooper: So you're looking at the development of the individual and his

need to completion, rather than focusing on a prohibition or taboo.

Fritz: Yes. Now let's take an example of a human being learning to do

something, say typing.

When I've learned to type well and formed the gestalt by practice,

then I'm free to attend to the content and not the mechanics of typing.

But if my typing is still faulty, like doing an m for an n, then a lot of effort

must still be invested in the unfinished situation.

The whole acting out bit of Freud is something similar.

We are repeating a certain unfinished situation.

For example, we always get disappointed in the same friend or we are always

being sucked in by certain personalities.

All this is because we avoid something in the relationship that would lead to

closure, to an understanding of that person, or to the ability to "let go" if

this is not the right person.

Sure psychoanalysts probably think in the same terms.

They would say we have to cure, we have to work through that complex.

But the complex is not worked through in the form of coming to closure but

only in retracing the event to some so-called trauma, some happening in

childhood. This is something quite different from completing the person.

Cooper: And picking up on what's happening here and now.

Fritz: And working on what's here and now and what's missing in that person.

Cooper: I wonder if you would like to relate acting out to the four layers

of therapy and neurosis that you were talking about in the group this

morning. You described the role-playing layer as first, then the implosive

layer leading to the impasse, then the explosive layer,

and finally authentic living.

Would you see acting out as related to the third layer, the explosive one?

Fritz: Yes, that's very interesting. We are "acting out" in the first layer

in playing out roles but this is definitely not in the Freudian sense of thinking

that this is an unfinished situation that is bad.

We are acting out the patient in the therapy situation so eventually an

explosion can be achieved.

The acting out in the Freudian sense, the incomplete situation without

awareness, is the blocking of the explosion.

Cooper: I am thinking of the four areas of explosion you've mentioned

in this third layer: explosion into sexual love, into anger, into joy,

and into grief. The anger and the sexual love are the ones that get the

most attention and that is where the therapists get most concerned

with social consequences.

Fritz: I would say Freud is very much in favor of living out,

acting out, the grief. He's done beautiful work on the mourning labor.

I don't see much of him ever written about the acting out of joy.

He, Wilhelm Reich, Adler, and many other have written a lot about anger

and they are completely off the mark by having real semantic confusion.

Sometimes they talk about aggression, the sadism or cruelty, then anger,

then hostility.

Cooper: Hostility seems to be very popular these days.

Fritz: Yes, and they never make clear what is going on.

These are completely different forms of functioning.

A salesman can be aggressive, having initiative, without being hostile.

Cooper: His assertion could also be quite appropriate.

Fritz: I want to give you my favorite example.

If I swallow my food, forcing the food down on the basis of greediness,

and I am not aggressive toward the food (do not try to destroy the food),

then I might get stomach trouble and also develop a certain amount of

"introjective tendency" instead of understanding assimilation.

Cooper: In gestalt the aggression is a necessary part of the

assimilation process.

Fritz: In gestalt? In nature! The supermarket made us forget that we kill

in order to survive. Every being kills in order to survive.

Only the human being kills out of greed more than he needs.

He kills out of habit formation.

Cooper: We've been talking mainly, I think, about acting out in terms of

working through the process with the person in the therapy situation.

Many times when the acting out taboo comes up, it's that the patient is

doing something outside the therapy situation.

He is acting out sexually or aggressively in ways that the therapist gets

concerned about. The therapist feels the person may not be contributing

to his development by this behavior.

Fritz: Okay, I'll give you an example of mine. When I was in analysis,

I had no relationship to that guy. He hardly ever spoke in therapy.

Five minute before the therapy hour was finished,

he scratched the floor as a signal that the hour was over.

He believed in completely passive therapy.

Now I noticed what he cherished.

He called me an Omar Khayyam when listening to my adventures.

So all I did during the time I was in analysis with him was go out for

more and more adventures so as to be able to tell him something.

I acted out, and the acting out was to please him.

He never discussed this with me.

Cooper: So you were trying to have something to report.

Fritz: Sure, and this happens with other therapists.

The whole thing is so silly, the acting out bit.

Just as silly as psychoanalysis itself among gestalt therapists.

The acting out, the compulsion!

Come rain, come shine, the person goes every day to the same place

for an hour whether he is depressed or happy,

whether he wants to go or not, he goes.

What rigid compulsion, rigid acting out that is.

And then the hour must not be one minute less or one minute more

than fifty, notwithstanding the fact that most of the people don't say

a real thing except for the last two minutes.

Suddenly then they have something urgent to say so as to torture

the therapist, to prolong and put him into a quandry on how he can

finish up and get his ten-minute rest.

Have you not seen that?

Cooper: Yes, and I've done it myself.

Fritz: That's crap and being compulsive, the 50 minutes.

Look at our workshop advantage.

Sometimes we work 20 minutes with a person, sometimes an hour and a half.

This whole individual therapy crap is completely obsolete.

It's a fossilized survivor of the Freudian period when they thought

psychoanalysis was a means to cure people.

Cooper: So you see this general term of acting out as a taboo that

Freud got started.

Fritz: Not only that. I go a step further.

Consider the deep phobia of Freud who was a very, very sick man:

What was he acting out?

He was acting out the business of not going out, not acting out.

Such pain he had to cross the street, what pain to talk to any person.

He was so embarrassed and so self-conscious. However, in a true deep

meaning of Freud, I think he was saying be careful of acting out as a means

of avoiding: bring your real problems to this place of therapy, this is better.

Notwithstanding this, I'm very suspicious whether the taboo of acting out is not

just as much a rationalization of Freud's phobia.

Cooper: How would you relate the acting out taboo to different cultural

mores and setting?

Like in one setting they may allow more sexual freedom and more

aggressive expression.

Fritz: Freud never meant this by acting out.

Freud meant by acting out that some type of pathological behavior is

slipping out and is executed as a piece of living, instead of piece of discussion

on the couch.

What you are talking about is freedom of action, a full awareness that this is

permissible and that is not permissible.

This is fine to an extent but has nothing to do with the specific thing Freud

meant by acting out.

If you go that far, then the only way to live would be not to do a thing.

Cooper: So you want to look more in terms of the process going on

in the person and how much awareness he has of what he's doing.

Fritz: Yes, as well as what awareness he has of what he's not doing.

Cooper: What he's avoiding.

Fritz: Yes.

Cooper: And that would be the basis for differentiating between role

playing in these earlier layers of neurosis and authentic living?

Fritz: Yes, yes. It is to say that somebody cannot see himself as a grownup.

He has to have parents; hanging on to a real mother, a dead mother,

a psychoanalytical mother, anything not to let go.

Cooper: This is related to what you call the Dummy Complex

in your book Ego, Hunger, and Aggression, isn't it?

Fritz: Yes. Hanging on to the idea that one is a child, and this is Freudian

acting out-one repeats what has happened before, investigates what has

happened before, and it is a part of keeping the patient in an infantile state.

Now acting out in a good sense means letting go, let the dead bury the dead,

let the parents be the parents.

The other man does so and so but I am a free agent, a free agent on my own.

I don't relate to this guy out of a fixation; I relate to him because I want to

and to the degree that I feel relatedness.

Cooper: A here and now experience with the person.

Fritz: Yes, yes.

Cooper: Could you relate acting out to the balance concept in gestalt,

the figur×ground balance of the person you are working with?

Fritz: Yes, in the acting out material (the repetition of something),

one of the polarities is always hidden.

Let's take the basic acting out.

What do we act out as our usual moral or self-improvement system?

The topdog-underdog system. You know this game.

We are aware of the inefficient underdog part in ourselves,

but we are not aware of the character of the top part in ourselves.

Our own righteous behavior, we take that for granted.

And thus the balance between the submissive behavior and the bullying

behavior, between the aggressive and the frightened, cannot be achieved.

Let's go back to Freudian terms.

He would say there is not a strong ego because the patient is all superego.

What Freud misses is that there is an infra-ego balancing the superego.

What would you call acting out there?

If I torture myself, sure then I am acting out.

But where is the exact point of where you put in that the acting out is bad?

Just because you are naughty and don't bring your therapist these things?

I feel that is good to take a new look at acting out and what some of the

confusion has been.

This is the bloody thing always when somebody creates a wrong notion.

This wrong notion is then accepted as a reality where there should be nothing.

And then the whole world has to start to refute and fight the nonsense.

Look what it did to Wilhelm Reich to take the libido as something real instead

of as just a conceptual whim of Freud. He went completely off his rocker.

Are there some questions you'd like to ask?

Cooper: I know in groups I've been in with you, you usually say you take

no responsibility for an individual's behavior outside the group situation.

Would that be your view of the patient's behavior outside the therapy

situation, that it's up to him?

Fritz: Exactly. I'm responsible only for myself.

If you decide to go crazy, it's your business.

If I am a responsible therapist I invest my

skilled knowledge into working with you.

Cooper: If he wants to bring this into the therapy situation and work,

then you're there to work with him?

Fritz: Yes. I don't have a compulsion to win or be the Almighty or the best

therapist in the world.

Anyone not willing to limit his responsibility to himself is beset with the

need to be omnipotent.

This is a distorted view of the self and of one's potential.

Cooper: He's expecting more of himself than he can really deliever.

Fritz: Sure.

Cooper: I wonder if we can relate acting out some more to the different

layers: role-playing, implosive, explosive, authentic.

The first or role-playing layer is obviously related; we see all kinds

of behavior which could be labelled acting out.

Fritz: Sure.

Cooper: What about the second layer, the implosive one?

What would you see happening there?

Fritz: What is happening is not acting out.

There is fear of being, a basic contraction or freezing.

This is the equivalent with what Freud sensed as the death instinct.

But it is not an instinct for death; if anything, it is the opposit.

As you see when it's worked out to the explosion, it's very much being alive!

Look at my hand. If I keep an exact balance of extensor and contractor

muscles, I can get an extremely rigid claw which can't move.

A very rigid position.

Yet there is a double amount of energy here, two parts of myself trying

to take control and in exact balance.

This is life still; it is catatonic.

Cooper: You don't have any figure·ground shifting.

Fritz: Exactly. This is the impasse-being stuck-neither acting out

nor not acting out. The slightest acting out here, a slight trembling,

is the beginning of dissolution of the implosive layer.

Cooper: How about the third layer, the explosive one?

Here you mention explosions into sexual love, anger, joy, grief.

Fritz: These are explosions from the center of the personality

which is the soul, also called the center of emotion.

This brings the ability to feel and to live again.

Cooper: It starts coming out in strong form at that point?

Fritz: Not necessarily strong.

In some cases there are extreme explosions at this point.

In other forms there is just a slight trembling.

Explosions can be like those in your auto engine, not that noticeable.

The thing is that the contractions are beginning to work again.

The implosive layer is kind of like hibernating.

A hibernating animal freezes up, contracts. It's not dead, it preserves life.

And then it finally begins to vibrate again.

Cooper: Do people get to the explosive layer, then back up to the

implosive layer before they get going with authentic living?

Fritz: Yes. Sometimes you find that only a certain segment is freed

by explosion, and then the energy is freed in the total personality.

The person becomes more alive.

He then is able to cope with other of the feeling levels better.

The one emotion easiest to reach is usually grief because it is,

in most cases, socially acceptable.

The explosion into love is often difficult.

The hardest for the neurotic is into joy.

Cooper: Could you talk about the way you work with, say,

anger and sexual love in therapy, the kind of limits you put on?

Fritz: I don't put any limits on any explosion, including fucking!

It doesn't really come to fucking, but there are no taboos in

my kind of therapy.

You can at least fuck in fantasy and aggress against a pillow.

Cooper: Here in the workshop one time you had people fighting

with just their feet.

Wasn't this a way to limit what they could do to each other?

Fritz: No, no, the leg thing came about because some of the people

had no legs. Legs are very important for self-support.

I suggested they move further apart as they began to use their

legs so they would not accidentally hit the genitals or something.

There are small precautions. But in the extreme, I've very nearly

been killed quite a few times.

But if you don't want to take the risk, don't be a therapist.

Cooper: In a group situation you have some support from

the group to help control explosions.

Fritz: What do you mean "control explosions?"

We don't want to control explosions!

Cooper: Okay. Prevent injury, shall I say?

Fritz: These injuries are not true explosions.

True explosions I've seen are usually like those into joy

where people dance around.

Exceptions are real psychotic cases, a psychotic episode

when somebody really wants to kill.

Instead of exploding into impotence and realizing the impotence

of impotence, they try to avoid impotence by killing.

Killing is always a sign of impotence.

Cooper: So you just take your chances?

Fritz: EXACTLY!

From John O. Stevens's "gestalt is".