Acting-Out

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (66)

1. #01

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.162

   *Relationship with the Mother*

   Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical vignette, Fink demonstrates how the mother's jouissance becomes installed in the analysand's bodily experience and desire, and how analytic work—via variable-length sessions and the analysand's own self-analyzing—enables a gradual exorcism of that maternal inscription, illustrating core Lacanian principles about the analyst's non-masterful position and the analysand's active role.

   As a boy, he used to drive nails into the ground, which he called "mother earth," instead of attacking his mother directly. He also showed his anger toward certain animate substitutes

2. #02

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.168

   *Analytic Stance*

   Theoretical move: Fink argues that the analyst's primary clinical tool is the expression of the Desire of the Analyst — not interpretation or resistance-accusation — and that this desire is what sustains the analysand's capacity to symbolize an inherently resistant Real; the analyst occupies the place of the unconscious for the analysand, making the unacceptable speakable through transference.

   his various attempts over the course of the first couple of years of analysis to reduce the number of sessions per week or break off the analysis altogether as primarily signs of his being disturbed by the material

3. #03

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

   <span id="page-174-0"></span>[INTER\(OED\)DICTIONS](#page-8-0)

   Theoretical move: This clinical vignette introduces a case of compulsive pornography use, deploying the concepts of addiction, acting out, and the scopic drive to frame the analysand's symptom as structured by a secret enjoyment that blocks symbolic commitment (marriage), with the post-phone-call binge functioning as a transference acting-out that signals the subject's demand for the analyst to assume the inhibiting function.

   he 'binged' on porn right after we spoke on the phone to schedule our first appointment, as if to signal that he was sick of self-restraint and wanted me to somehow take over the role of inhibiting him.

4. #04

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.181

   INTER(OED)DICTIONS

   Theoretical move: Through the clinical case of "Slater," Fink demonstrates how a weak or absent paternal interdiction produces a subject who unconsciously stages scenarios in which the Other (the father) discovers his secrets, thereby soliciting from the father the very prohibitive intervention the father structurally failed to provide—a failed paternal function that leaves the subject without the symbolic protection and castrating cut the Name of the Father ought to deliver.

   it seems that Slater perhaps left his father clues so that he would find out, and this led to what Slater described as the most dramatic incident in his entire life.

5. #05

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.182

   **"Can He Lose Me?"**

   Theoretical move: The passage uses a clinical vignette to develop Lacan's concept of the self-destructive gesture as a question directed at the parental Other ("Can he lose me?"), showing how the subject's suicidal act functions as a message aimed at depriving the Other of jouissance rather than as straightforward self-destruction.

   One way Slater formulated his self-destructive gesture in the analysis was to say that he wanted to deprive his father of the pleasure he clearly seemed to take in cross-examining his son

6. #06

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.181

   INTER(OED)DICTIONS

   Theoretical move: The passage performs a clinical reading of a patient's (Slater's) symptomatic behaviours—suicide attempt and compulsive porn use—as acts of rebellion against a paternal prohibition, linking identification with the father to the structure of the Oedipus complex and the role of the paternal message in shaping the subject's desire.

   his looking at Internet porn was part of a renewed rebellion against this father who had forbade him to look at Playboy. To look at porn was to say "No!" to his father.

7. #07

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.185

   **Alcoholism?**

   Theoretical move: Through close clinical narration, Fink demonstrates how a patient's symptomatic behaviour (alcoholism/acting out) is structured by identificatory desire and the demand for the Other's gaze, reading the drinking episodes as staged scenes meant to appear on a screen and compel the sister's notice — thereby linking the symptom to both identification with the father and the scopic drive.

   it was as if he wanted to appear on the TV screen, in the very scene his sister was watching—that would make her notice him! Drinking himself into a coma was certainly a way of doing so

8. #08

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink

   **Oeddictions**

   Theoretical move: Addiction is reframed not as a discrete diagnostic category but as a symptomatic structure of repetition driven by a jouissance that is never fully attained; the failure to reach satisfaction is itself the engine of repetition, and the persistence of an appeal to the Other means such acts retain an Oedipal (not merely preoedipal) dimension that can keep them short of lethal.

   Insofar as there is often a direct or indirect appeal to the Other even in the most extreme addiction-related actions—for example, Slater's passages à l'acte

9. #09

   Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.195

   **Notes**

   Theoretical move: This endnotes passage applies Lacanian concepts—primarily passage à l'acte, jouissance, anxiety, and repression—to two clinical vignettes (Freud's young homosexual woman and the case of Slater), using Lacan's account of the bind (*embarras*) and emotion (*émoi*) as the structural coordinates that precipitate acting-out toward passage à l'acte.

   Her passage à l'acte thus involves the combination of the bind with the emotion. They are resolved in a sense by her attempting to take herself off of the stage of life or out of the picture or scene.

10. #10

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.217

    **Herstoria**

    Theoretical move: Fink constructs a detailed clinical-biographical portrait of Marilyn Monroe's early life and relational patterns to establish the structural conditions — absent paternal function, unstable identificatory anchors, compulsive fantasy-construction, and hysterical demand for unconditional love — that a Lacanian analysis will later interpret. The passage functions as evidentiary groundwork for a case study in hysteria, desire, and the failure of the Name-of-the-Father.

    on numerous occasions as an adult, she took overdoses of barbiturates knowing full well that someone was about to call or come over to see her

11. #11

    Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.222

    **The Demand for Absolute Love**

    Theoretical move: By reading Marilyn Monroe's case through a structural lens, Fink argues that hysteria is defined by an insatiable demand for the Other's unconditional love, and that Greenson's collapse of analytic boundaries—driven by an ego-psychological service-industry model—exemplifies the theoretical failure that results when the analyst abandons the Desire of the Analyst in favour of attempting to satisfy the hysteric's demand.

    she pushed him to the breaking point... bowed to Marilyn's threats of indulging in drugs again and all sorts of other threats by granting five-hour-long sessions.

12. #12

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.30

    <span id="page-23-0"></span>ANALYSAND AND ANALYST IN THE [GLOBAL ECONOMY, OR WHY ANYONE](#page-7-0) IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD PAY FOR AN ANALYSIS > **Three Clinical Vignettes** > COMMENTARY

    Theoretical move: The passage uses a clinical vignette to argue that neurotic jouissance is structured as a refusal to relinquish symptomatic enjoyment, even at financial cost; the goal of analysis is not the elimination of all enjoyment but the dissipation of the enjoyment tied to symptoms, a "pound of flesh" that money alone cannot substitute for.

    Jeffrey would go to bed so late at night that he slept through our sessions, no matter what time they were scheduled the next day. His goal was to get his father to pay—after all, the money he gave me came from his father—to get his father to pay for nothing at all.

13. #13

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.33

    <span id="page-23-0"></span>ANALYSAND AND ANALYST IN THE [GLOBAL ECONOMY, OR WHY ANYONE](#page-7-0) IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WOULD PAY FOR AN ANALYSIS > **Three Clinical Vignettes** > *The Refusal to Work*

    Theoretical move: The analysand's financial situation is not merely external but enters the libidinal economy of the analysis itself; the clinical vignettes demonstrate that conditions around payment and work can either precipitate or abort the analytic process, and that refusal to work is often a symptomatic insistence that the Other continue to pay for a perceived deprivation.

    he broke off the analysis. Three days later, he resumed having sessions and set about working part-time

14. #14

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.72

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Notes**

    Theoretical move: These footnotes clarify key theoretical distinctions in Lacan's framework: the separation of symptom from fantasy as persistently distinct notions, the prioritization of the symbolic over the imaginary dimension of transference against Kleinian object relations, and the set-theoretical grounding of alienation and separation—all serving to demarcate Lacan's approach from competing psychoanalytic traditions.

    the analysand 'forgets' to pay bills (telephone, mortgage, car insurance, condo fees, etc.), to have his car inspected, to prepare and file tax returns, and so on, leading 'the Man' to come looking for him.

15. #15

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.73

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > <span id="page-71-0"></span>[THE ETHICS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS](#page-7-0)

    Theoretical move: Against psychology's co-optation by social norms (the "service of goods"), Fink argues that the ethics of psychoanalysis is oriented first and foremost toward the analysand's desire—desire which is constitutively the Other's desire, making analytic work a process of sifting one's own desire from the inherited desires of the Other.

    'acting out' has to do with things the patient finds it impossible or unpleasant to say, or with what the therapist is not enabling the patient to say or come to grips with through speech.

16. #16

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.98

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Semblance**

    Theoretical move: Fink maps Lacan's concept of semblance across the three registers (Imaginary/Symbolic/Real) and argues that all discourse is constituted by semblance, while psychoanalysis distinguishes itself by attending to the truth of the unconscious that semblance systematically excludes — with the Name-of-the-Father and the symptom serving as paradigm cases of signs whose referent remains unknown.

    when attention is specifically drawn to semblance, we have what Lacan here calls 'acting out,' which involves bringing semblance onto the stage, putting it front and center, right in front of everyone's noses

17. #17

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.98

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Semblance**

    Theoretical move: Fink maps Lacan's concept of semblance across the three registers (Imaginary/Symbolic/Real) and argues that all discourse is constituted by semblance, while psychoanalysis distinguishes itself by attending to the truth of the unconscious that semblance systematically excludes — with the Name-of-the-Father and the symptom serving as paradigm cases of signs whose referent remains unknown.

    He says that we also refer to that as 'passion'—by which I assume he means acts or crimes of passion—and passion is generally associated by Lacan with the imaginary realm

18. #18

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.189

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Relations with His Sister and Other Women**

    Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical case, Fink demonstrates how the traumatic primal scene (mother's murder of the sister) structures the patient's entire erotic and aggressive life, binding sexuality irreversibly to death, dismemberment, and castration anxiety, while his obsessional neurosis channels violence into fantasy and inhibition rather than act.

    He once said that he would like to see women as 'facilitators' of his Eros, but slipped and said 'fatilitators,' in which he heard the word 'fatal.'

19. #19

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.244

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > *Inability to Express Anger Directly*

    Theoretical move: Through a detailed clinical case, Fink argues that the analyst's proper role is not to "lay down the law" in response to an analysand's appeal for punishment and prohibition, but rather to interpret that appeal as a symptom of the subject's conflicted relation to a superego already in place — thereby reframing the transference dynamics and the evolution of fantasy as the real site of analytic work.

    his wish to be punished by me for what he referred to as his 'acting out' (by which he usually meant nothing more than acting 'badly') and his 'passive aggressive' behavior toward me.

20. #20

    Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.254

    <span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > *Diagnosis*

    Theoretical move: Fink argues that clinical diagnosis must be grounded in the predominant mechanism of negation (repression, disavowal, foreclosure) and structural criteria rather than surface behaviors, using Patrick's case to distinguish neurotic repetition compulsion from structural perversion/masochism, and to show how the analyst's own position can become the site where masochistic logic plays out.

    Many clinicians would have immediately assumed his behavior was directed at me or a message of some kind to me—indeed, an acting out—but this did not seem so clear to me at the outset.

21. #21

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_170"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0191"></span>**repetition**

    Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's successive redefinitions of Freudian repetition compulsion: from automatism tied to the complex, through the 1950s reformulation as the insistence of the signifier, to the 1960s recast as the return of jouissance — each move progressively de-biologising and re-semioticising (then re-libidinising) the concept while carefully distinguishing repetition from transference as its special clinical subset.

    psychoanalytic treatment can therefore break the cycle of repetition by helping the patient remember (see ACTING OUT).

22. #22

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_11"></span>**act**

    Theoretical move: The passage establishes 'the act' as a distinctively Lacanian ethical concept: only that which is fully assumed—consciously and unconsciously—qualifies as a true act, thereby linking responsibility, unconscious desire, and the death drive into a single ethical framework that distinguishes the act from acting out, passage to the act, and mere behaviour.

    Neither ACTING OUT nor a PASSAGE TO THE ACT are true acts, since the subject does not assume responsibility for his desire in these actions.

23. #23

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_189"></span>***sinthome***

    Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical evolution from Lacan's linguistic conception of the symptom (as signifier/ciphered message) to the topological concept of the *sinthome* as an unanalysable kernel of jouissance that serves as a fourth Borromean ring binding RSI, with Joyce's writing as the exemplary case of *sinthome*-as-suppléance in the absence of the paternal function.

    in 1963 Lacan goes on to state that the symptom, unlike acting out, does not call for interpretation; in itself, it is not a call to the Other

24. #24

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_142"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_page_0161"></span>***P*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part26.xhtml_ncx_146"></span>**passage to the act**

    Theoretical move: Lacan establishes a structural distinction between acting out and passage to the act: while both are defenses against anxiety, acting out remains within the symbolic (a message to the big Other), whereas the passage to the act is a flight into the real that dissolves the social bond and collapses the subject into the position of pure object (objet petit a).

    Acting out is a symbolic message addressed to the big Other, whereas a passage to the act is a flight from the Other into the dimension of the real.

25. #25

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_167"></span>**recollection**

    Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes recollection (remémoration) as a symbolic process of reconstructing one's history from reminiscence as an imaginary reliving of experience, positioning the analytic process on the side of symbolic reconstruction rather than affective re-experiencing or acting out.

    what matters is not 'reliving' the formative events of the past in any intuitive or experiential way (which would be mere reminiscence, or—even worse— ACTING OUT)

26. #26

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_174"></span>**sadism/masochism**

    Theoretical move: The passage makes two related theoretical moves: (1) it establishes Lacan's reversal of Freud's sadism/masochism hierarchy by grounding both in the invocatory drive, making masochism primary and sadism a disavowal of it; (2) it articulates the concept of 'scene' as the frame distinguishing acting out (remaining within the symbolic) from passage to the act (exit from the symbolic into the real via identification with objet petit a).

    The notion of scene is used by Lacan to distinguish between ACTING OUT and PASSAGE TO THE ACT. The former still remains inside the scene, for it is still inscribed in the symbolic order.

27. #27

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_19"></span>**anxiety**

    Theoretical move: Lacan radically reorients Freud's two theories of anxiety by tying it to the Real, the objet petit a, and the logic of lack—arguing that anxiety is not caused by separation from the mother but by the failure to separate, and that it is the only non-deceptive affect, arising specifically when lack itself is lacking (i.e., when objet petit a fills its place).

    Acting out and passage to the act are last defences against anxiety.

28. #28

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_12"></span>**acting Out**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of acting out is distinguished from the Freudian baseline by introducing the intersubjective dimension of the Other: acting out is not merely repetition substituting for memory, but a ciphered message addressed to a 'deaf' Other, locating the cause partly in the analyst's own interpretive failure (resistance of the analyst).

    acting out results when recollection is made impossible by the refusal of the Other to listen. When the Other has become 'deaf', the subject cannot convey a message to him in words, and is forced to express the message in actions.

29. #29

    An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans

    <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_211"></span>**truth**

    Theoretical move: Lacan's concept of truth is irreducibly plural in its functions: it is always particular (not universal), tied to desire and speech rather than exactitude or science, and structurally intertwined with deception, fiction, and the Real—making it impossible to reduce to a single definition while remaining central to psychoanalytic ethics and treatment.

    Psychoanalysis has shown that the truth about desire is often revealed by mistakes (parapraxes; see ACT).

30. #30

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.102

    **5** > He continues:

    Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud's "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" — against the ego-psychological mistranslation — is the pivot around which Lacan's critique of ego psychology, his return to Freud, and his theory of the subject as parlêtre (barred subject distinct from the ego) are simultaneously articulated, showing that the translation controversy has both clinical and metapsychological stakes.

    obsessional brittleness, hysterical actings-out, superegoistic masochism

31. #31

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.166

    **9**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian ego is constitutively paranoid, rivalrous, and regressive—structured by the mirror stage, the superego/ego-ideal dynamic, and the Master/Slave dialectic—and that ego-psychological analysis, by placing ego against ego in a transferential dyad, reproduces and aggravates this imaginary passion rather than dissolving it, producing only dead-end outcomes.

    'the impulsive leap into reality [réel] through the hoop of fantasy: acting out in a direction that is ordinarily the opposite of suggestion'

32. #32

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.220

    **12**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the structural impossibility of paternity (the father always failing to embody the Symbolic Law) produces superegoic overcompensation, and that the proper telos of Lacanian analysis is not happiness but the weakening of the Imaginary ego so that the Symbolic unconscious can speak — with the parlêtre's symptom-knots loosened by letting the unconscious articulate its truths.

    such neurotics sometimes attempt to dispel the threatening enigma of these puzzling feelings of culpability…through desperate passages à l'acte. These neurotics precipitously commit literal or figurative criminal acts

33. #33

    Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.256

    **13** > <span id="page-248-0"></span>**Conclusion Taking It to the Dogs: Actaeon's Revenge**

    Theoretical move: Drawing on the Actaeon/Diana myth from Ovid's Metamorphoses as an extended allegory, Johnston argues that the unconscious operates through traumatic contingent encounter, compulsive acting-out, and violent resistance, and that Lacan's "return to Freud" constitutes an ethical conspiracy against the IPA's distortion of psychoanalytic truth—with the unconscious itself (la Chose freudienne) guaranteeing the eventual vindication of that truth.

    Provocative actings-out and precipitous passages à l'acte are symptoms of unconscious truths still struggling for recognition and response.

34. #34

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.69

    JACQUES LACAN ECRITS > *Presentation of the Suite* > *Parenthesis of Parentheses (Added in 1966)* > 1-3 NETWORK

    Theoretical move: Lacan retrospectively situates his intellectual trajectory — from paranoiac knowledge and Clérambault's mental automatism through the mirror stage to the triad of Imaginary/Symbolic/Real — as the progressive displacement of ego-psychology's misguided appeal to reality, arguing that the mirror stage is the paradigmatic site where imaginary capture, desire's alienation in the Other, and the function of lack are first articulated.

    This brought me closer to the stage machinery of acting out [passage à l'acte]

35. #35

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.120

    The Mirror Stage as Formative of the / Function > A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the human sciences—unlike physical sciences—cannot evade the question of truth as constitutive of their object, and that psychoanalysis, precisely because its efficacy is conditioned by the truth of revelation, offers a privileged methodological contribution to criminology's dual search for the truth of the crime and the truth of the criminal.

    No 'behaviorist' ritual engaged in by the subject to protect his object can castrate of its creative and deadly tip

36. #36

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.127

    The Mirror Stage as Formative of the / Function > 77. *On the Sociological Reality of Crime and Law and on the Relation of Psychoanalysis to their Dialectical Foundation*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalytic theory must be rigorously bounded to its clinical experience and cannot be extrapolated to collective entities (national character, collective superego), while simultaneously demonstrating that the superego and Oedipalism are historically and sociologically conditioned phenomena whose pathogenic force is tied to the disintegration of the conjugal family unit—and that psychoanalysis "unrealizes" crime without dehumanizing the criminal, opening access to the criminal's imaginary world through transference.

    What requires explanation is thus less a criminal acting out by a subject trapped in what Daniel Lagache has quite correctly characterized as imaginary behavior

37. #37

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.237

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > **/ .** *Empty Speech and Full Speech in the Psychoanalytic Realisation of the Subject*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the unconscious is constituted by historicization and intersubjective discourse rather than by instinctual stages or biological analogy, and that psychoanalytic technique must be grounded in the subject's symbolic-historical reality rather than in biological mythology or dyadic object-relation thinking.

    a coincidence which is, moreover, most often constituted by an entirely verbal, even homonymic, convergence, or which, if it includes an act, involves an 'acting out' by one of the analyst's other patients or by the patient's child who is in analysis.

38. #38

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.267

    Presentation on Psychical Causality > *III. The Resonances of Interpretation and the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the intersubjective, dialectical character of psychoanalytic interpretation—anchored in speech and the subject's truth—is systematically degraded by ego-psychological "two-body psychology," which reduces analysis to an imaginary, objectifying relation; he demonstrates this through the Rat Man and Dora cases and mounts a critique of the analysis of defenses, countertransference misuse, and suggestion as pseudo-technique.

    In the case of the hysterical subject, for whom the term 'acting out'* takes on its literal meaning since he acts outside himself, you have to get him to recognize where his action is situated.

39. #39

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.518

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power > /. *Who Analyses Today?* > *II. What Is the Place of Interpretation?*

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses a close critical reading of Ernst Kris's case (the plagiarism case) to demonstrate that Ego Psychology's method of analyzing defense before drive—by privileging the surface/objective situation—misses desire's metonymic structure and produces acting out rather than subjective rectification; a different topology (not depth vs. surface) is required to locate desire.

    An admission which, rather than sanctioning the felicity of the intervention by way of the material it contributes, seems to me to have the corrective value of an acting out* in the very report he gives of it.

40. #40

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.528

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power > 777. *Where Do We Stand Regarding Transference?*

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that reducing analytic technique to an imaginary object-relation ordered by "distance" — and its corollary, the collapse of the analytic situation into "reality" — produces conceptual impasses that force analysts toward the exercise of power rather than genuine engagement with the subject's being; only proper conceptualization of the symbolic register (signifier, phobic object, castration, transference) can prevent this decline.

    Naturally, this procedure played a part in the benign outcome of the acting out* under examination here: since the analyst—who was, moreover, aware of the fact—was thus constantly intervening in a castrating manner.

41. #41

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.551

    The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > *IV. How to Act with One's Being* > 9. Let us nevertheless articulate what structures desire.

    Theoretical move: Lacan argues that desire is constitutively beyond demand and irreducible to need, and that the failure of contemporary analysts lies in collapsing this distinction—reducing transference to suggestion, fantasy to imagination, and ending analysis in imaginary identification rather than traversing desire's metonymic structure. The subject's split ($) and the metonymic character of desire are presented as the structural conditions that properly orient analytic practice.

    the very reason why people speak of passage à l'acte [acting out], that Rubicon whose characteristic desire is always camouflaged in history in favor of its success

42. #42

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.814

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTES TO INTRODUCTION TO JEAN HYPPOLIT E S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' " > NOTES TO "RESPONS E TO JEAN HYPPOLITE' S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' "

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial/translatorial notes to Lacan's "Response to Jean Hyppolite's Commentary on Freud's 'Verneinung'," clarifying terminological choices, providing bibliographic references, and glossing key concepts (foreclosure, ek-sistence, acting out, primordial symbolization) as they appear in the Écrits text—without advancing a sustained independent theoretical argument.

    the first example will be seen to concern hallucination in Freud's case of the Wolf Man, whereas the second example concerns acting out in Kris' case of the man who loved fresh brains.

43. #43

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.837

    Appendix II: Metaphor of the Subject¹ > NOTES TO INTRODUCTION TO JEAN HYPPOLIT E S COMMENTARY ON FREUD' S 'VERNEINUNG' " > NOTE S TO "TH E SITUATION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE TRAININ G OF PSYCHOANALYSTS IN 1956" > NOTE S T O TH E DIRECTIO N O F TH E TREATMEN T

    Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial footnotes and translator's notes to Lacan's Écrits, clarifying terminology, alternative translations, and intertextual references; it is apparatus rather than primary theoretical argumentation.

    Passage a Vacte is the French translation of the German Agieren (translated into English as 'acting out') that was usual in the 1950s. Lacan confirms that here... Nevertheless, Lacan begins to distinguish passage a Vacte from acting out later (see, for example, Seminar XIV, February 22, 1967).

44. #44

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.871

    Classified Index of the Major Concepts

    Theoretical move: This passage is the prefatory apparatus and classified index of major concepts from Lacan's Écrits, compiled by Jacques-Alain Miller with a brief note by Lacan himself; it organizes the theoretical architecture of the Écrits as a system around the Symbolic Order, the Signifier, the subject, and their clinical and epistemological ramifications, while asserting that Lacanian discourse constitutes a closed, coherent formalization.

    intersections between the symbolic and the real without imaginary mediation: hallucination, passion on the subject's part, acting out, action on the subject's part

45. #45

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.345

    Response to Jean Hyppolite 's Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung"

    Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes Freud's Verneinung to establish that what is excluded from primordial symbolization (Verwerfung/foreclosure) does not enter the unconscious but returns in the Real—as hallucination, erratic castration, or acting out—while simultaneously critiquing ego psychology's failure to grasp this structure.

    this is the mode of reaction that we designate in analytic technique as 'acting out,' without always clearly delimiting its meaning. As we shall see, our considerations today can help us revamp the notion.

46. #46

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.349

    Response to Jean Hyppolite 's Commentary on Freud's "Verneinung"

    Theoretical move: Lacan uses Kris's clinical case to argue that ego-psychology's method of analyzing resistance by mapping the patient's world onto the analyst's patterns produces acting out rather than genuine analytic progress—demonstrating that approaching defenses from the "surface" (the ego) fails to engage the subject's own desire and instead elicits incongruous responses whose drive-reality is not the reality value that symptoms achieve.

    We have here in every respect an example of an acting out*, which is no doubt small in size, but very well constituted.

47. #47

    Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.374

    The Freudian Thing > *The Thing's Order* > *Imaginary Passion*

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ego is constituted through an imaginary passion (amour-propre) rooted in the mirror stage, generating a libidinal alienation that structures all object-desire through the other's desire, installs a permanent "it's you or me" dyadic war, and reduces analytic technique to three untenable outcomes when it operates solely within this imaginary register.

    Either the impulsive leap into reality [reel] through the hoop of fantasy: acting out* in a direction that is ordinarily the opposite of suggestion.

48. #48

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.333

    **xx** > **ON A CIRCLE THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO A POINT**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's desire is structurally circular and irreducible — sustained as impossible by circling through oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and vociferous registers without ever closing on itself — and that this topology (figured as a circle on a torus that cannot be contracted to a point) explains the obsessional's relation to symptom, acting-out, passage à l'acte, idealized love, and narcissistic image-maintenance.

    Acting-out is the spurt, that is, what always happens owing to a fact that comes from somewhere other than the cause on which one has just acted.

49. #49

    Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.198

    **x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that woman's relation to jouissance is structurally superior to man's because her bond with desire is looser — she is not knotted to the phallic negative (-φ) in the same essential way — and uses mythological (Tiresias), philosophical (Sartre/Hegel), and topological (the pot/void) resources to articulate how the real is not lack but fullness, while the hole/void that structures desire is specifically man's burden.

    when I bring along a full array of carefully finished pots... When I put impediment at the top of the column that includes acting-out and embarrassment at the top of the one next to it, which includes passage à l'acte

50. #50

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.153

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces acting-out as the structural representative of the deficient representation of the psychoanalytic act: because the analytic intervention misreads or inadequately articulates what is at stake (as in Kris's ego-psychological "surface" intervention), the patient enacts/stages what was not properly interpreted, bringing the oral object-a "on a plate." This positions acting-out as the inverse shadow of the analytic act, and advances the argument that the psychoanalytic act is structurally non-sexual yet topologically related to the sexual act via the analytic couch.

    we call that, acting-out… to represent, in parenthesis, as a play, story and so on, in action… as: act out a scene that one has read. Thus, there are two moments. You have read something… Someone here wants to show you what it is. He acts it. This is what to act out is.

51. #51

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.123

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

    Theoretical move: The Act is defined not as motor discharge but as the intrinsic repetition of the signifier upon itself—a double loop that constitutes the subject as pure division; its effects are measured topologically by the mutation of surface produced by the cut, and Verleugnung is specifically identified as the rubric for the ambiguity that results from these effects.

    the same cut intervening at the other vertix … which corresponds to the connection: unconscious - I am not - this is what is called acting-out and it is the status of this that we will try to define the next time.

52. #52

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.150

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 14: Wednesday 8 March 1967**

    Theoretical move: By introducing the concept of acting-out via the Kris case and the English etymology of 'to act out', Lacan argues that acting-out is a response to an inadequate or failed analytic intervention—specifically, a deficient representation of the psychoanalytic act itself—thereby linking the structure of acting-out to the inexact position of the analytic act relative to repression and the symptom.

    the analytic act has, I would say, in a fashion rather in conformity with the structure of repression, a sort of inexact position. A representative... of its deficient representation is given us under the name precisely of acting-out

53. #53

    Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.123

    the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 11: Wednesday 15 February 1967**

    Theoretical move: The passage defines the Act as structurally equivalent to repetition-in-a-single-stroke (the double loop of the signifier), grounded in the topology of the Möbius strip cut; it argues that the act constitutes the subject as pure division (Repräsentanz), and that Verleugnung names the ambiguity produced by the act's effects, distinguishing the act from mere motor performance, imitation, and acting-out.

    the same cut intervening at the other vertix, the one designated here, which corresponds to the connection: unconscious - I am not - this is what is called acting-out and it is the status of this that we will try to define the next time.

54. #54

    Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.94

    **VI**

    Theoretical move: Lacan introduces Verwerfung (foreclosure) as a logical-prior failure of primitive symbolization—distinct from repression—whereby what is not symbolized reappears in the Real, establishing the foundational distinction between psychosis and neurosis and grounding a critique of the "defense" concept and premature interpretation in analytic technique.

    I treat acting out as equivalent to a hallucinatory phenomenon of the delusional type that occurs when you symbolize prematurely, when you address something in the order of reality and not within the symbolic register.

55. #55

    A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.204

    Notes > Chapter 2 The Metaphysics of the Voice

    Theoretical move: This is a notes/endnotes section providing bibliographic citations, clarificatory remarks, and brief theoretical asides for Chapter 2 on the metaphysics of the voice; substantive theoretical content is minimal and mostly cross-referential, touching on the mirror stage/objet a distinction, the voice-castration structural tie, and the voice's role in jouissance and sexuation.

    we must bear in mind that for Lacan, passage à l'acte is sharply opposed to acting out. It is difficult to find a good English equivalent.

56. #56

    Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy · Todd McGowan · p.81

    Tragedy and Pathos > The Pathetic Martin Heidegger

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Heidegger's philosophy of finitude installs pathos as the dominant modern mode of relating to others, crowding out both tragedy and comedy—both of which require transcendence—and that this ubiquitous finitude reduces all beings to pitiable victims, eliminating the dignity that comedy and tragedy confer.

    In both cases, a woman's body acts out of her control and disturbs the public world in which the woman exists.

57. #57

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.105

    8. > Toward a New Conception of Affects

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the question of whether affects can be unconscious is the central unresolved problem at the intersection of psychoanalytic metapsychology and clinical practice, and that Freud's introduction of the superego and second topography forces a reconsideration of the consciousness-requirement for affect—with guilt as the paradigmatic test case revealing the theoretical difficulties this creates.

    precipitously acting out in transgressive manners so as paradoxically to create a definite cause for a preceding, already-felt sense of indefinite guilt that is free floating

58. #58

    Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience · Adrian Johnston & Catherine Malabou · p.176

    12. > F r o m P s y c h o a n a l y s i s to the Neurosciences

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's metapsychology of affect, centered on anxiety as the uniquely human affect arising from the parlêtre's estrangement from self-transparent affective experience, must be read as a transcontextual theoretical framework rather than merely a historically contingent intervention, and it defends a dialectical (bidirectional) relation between anxiety and doubt against Lacan's own obsessional-neurosis-specific formulation of anxiety as the cause of doubt.

    the latter state sometimes precipitating rash behaviors of the sort referred to by all analytic orientations as instances of 'acting-out'

59. #59

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.343

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Violence Enframed

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that impotent *passage à l'acte* — violent outbursts in American culture — functions as ideological displacement, redirecting structural critique (of capital, of founding violence) into personalized, self-defeating aggression; the mirror stage, the obscene primordial father, and the family as ideological machine are deployed to theorize why such acts fail to constitute genuine political resistance.

    A classic Hollywood action film is always a good illustration... they engage in a passionate violent fight, beating one another until their faces are streaming with blood... a clear instance of the violent passage à l'acte serving as a lure, a vehicle of ideological displacement.

60. #60

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.104

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Difficulty of Being a Kantian

    Theoretical move: The passage advances a Greimasian structural analysis of the analyst's position relative to Christ, Teacher, and Scientist, arguing that both Christ and the analyst *are* rather than merely *perform* their function — one through ontological being, the other through transference. This is extended into a broader Schellingian/Hegelian thesis that Evil is the actualization of a Ground that should remain potential, illustrated through the *Star Wars* saga's failure to dramatize how excessive attachment to Good generates Evil.

    two identical outbursts of uncontrollable destructive rage, the first against Padme, the second as an acting-out of the remorse for committing the first

61. #61

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.312

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Jouissance as a Political Category

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary politics is fundamentally a biopolitical regulation of jouissance rather than emancipatory politics proper, tracing this through liberal ideology's fantasmatic disgust, the symmetry between fundamentalism and liberal hedonism, and the paradox of the superego imperative to enjoy—where permitted jouissance becomes obligatory jouissance—culminating in a reading of The Matrix as staging the co-dependence of the big Other (Symbolic) and the Real.

    the only option left was a direct, brutal passage à l'acte, push-toward-the-Real, which took three main forms: a search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; Leftist political terrorism...and, finally, the turn toward the Real of an inner experience

62. #62

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.233

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Emotions Lie, or, Where Damasio Is Wrong

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that music (via Wagner's *Tristan*) lies about its own affective status—its true "truth" resides not in the grand metaphysical affect but in the ridiculous narrative interruptions that enable it—and then uses this insight to critique Damasio's homeostatic/adaptationist account of emotion by invoking the psychoanalytic "death drive" as the minimal structure of freedom: a dis-adaptation from utilitarian-survivalist immersion that ruptures biological determinism.

    in our hatred of the racial Other we aggressively 'act out' and cover up our social impotence, our lack of social 'cognitive mapping'

63. #63

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.381

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Of Eggs, Omelets, and Bartleby's Smile

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bartleby-gesture of pure withdrawal ("I would prefer not to") constitutes not a preparatory stage but the permanent ontological foundation of revolutionary politics—a parallax shift from the gap between two somethings to the gap between something and nothing, which simultaneously empties the superego supplement from the Law and reduces metaphysical difference to the immanent void within reality itself.

    There is violence and violence: there are violent passages à l'acte which merely bear witness to the agent's impotence

64. #64

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.334

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that 'free choice' is always already a meta-choice whose conditions are ideologically pre-structured, and uses the Amish rumspringa as a model for how academic 'radical' distance from the state functions as a reproductive mechanism of hegemony rather than genuine resistance; against Critchley's ethics-first localism, Žižek proposes a parallax shift that reveals 'resistance' as feeding the power-machine, and authentic revolution as a 'Must' rather than an 'ought.'

    The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to 'be active,' to 'participate,' to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.

65. #65

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.327

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that egalitarian political "terror" (from the Jacobins to Maoism) is a symptom of the *foreclosure* of the economic sphere rather than its over-extension, and that Badiou's anti-Statist politics reaches a deadlock precisely because it refuses to grant the "economic" domain the dignity of Truth/evental potential—the only exit being to restore the economic as a site of Event.

    What was the Jacobins' recourse to radical 'terror' if not a kind of hysterical acting-out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the very fundamentals of economic order (private property, and so on)?

66. #66

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.261

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew mystifies constitutive social antagonism by displacing it onto an external limit, and that Milner's "Jewish exception" logic inadvertently reproduces this displacement; the properly Lacanian response is a "not-all" Europe in which everyone becomes an exception (objet petit a), dissolving the need for a constitutive Other — and he extends this critique to Jacques-Alain Miller's therapeutic-political proposal, which he reads as a socially conservative "compassionate cushion" that profits from the disarray of identifications rather than challenging the anonymous systems that produce it.

    passages à l'acte of the mentally ill insufficiently monitored due to the state of shortage that psychiatry has to endure