Enactments: An Evolving Dyadic Concept of Acting Out

Unspoken actions between the therapist and the patient have major and often unconscious influences on the psychotherapeutic situation. Mutual transferences can bring about acting-out behaviors that portray transference wishes and defenses within both parties. Such actions tend to replace or overshadow verbalizing intrapsychic strife and in that sense can function as formidable resistance to therapeutic introspection. They also may represent behavioral attempts to communicate significant earlier experiences. Reflection on this dyadic interplay has led to contemporary treatment concepts. Enactment, actualization, and treatment misalliances are behavioral manifestations of urges, conflicts, and identifications and they appear most frequently during regressive periods in psychotherapy. Initially an enactment may include a component of the therapist's reciprocal behavior as a necessary feature of the process, prior to a fuller dynamic understanding and eventual definitive interpretation. Collusion by the therapist, through mutual and continuing acting out or through attempts to re-parent, will encourage antitherapeutic misalliances that can lead to continuing symptomatic behaviors and boundary violations. Continuing self-inquiry is essential to facilitate therapeutic change and we need to be aware that the principal analyzing device available to bring about positive change in our patients, is to be found within ourselves.