New Perspectives on Acting-Out

Abstract

J. L. MORENO, FULL OF CREATIVE ACTIVITY, as Jonathan D. Moreno describes him in the introduction to his father's autobiography, broke the taboo of psychoanalysis against acting-out. If we divide actingout in the wider sense of the word into acting-in (within the therapeutic situation) and a narrower acting-out (outside the therapeutic situation), we can say that Moreno understood acting-in as being of main therapeutic importance (Blatner, 1973). He not only did not forbid this acting-in, but he used it therapeutically to free emotionally and cognitively inhibited persons from their inner prison. Nevertheless, the word, in addition to the action, was very important for him, as it was for Freud. But for Moreno, with his capacities for dramatic presentation, a word that was not accompanied by gestures, by concomitant mimic and pantomimic movements, was too much of an abstract statement. Moreno, as the author observed him in 1957 at the International Congress of Group Psychotherapy in Zurich, in 1965 in Milano, in 1968 in Vienna, and for the last time in 1973 in Zurich, was full of vivacious expressions and knew how to hold the audience with his presentation. One could say that Moreno with his Stegreiftheater, which he had been developing since 1910, first in Vienna and after 1923 in New York and Beacon, was the first to discover the importance of action in confronting a person with his or her memories of the past, his or her actual
preoccupations, and his or her future possibilities.