Acting Out

Abstract

Evil and sin are seen as residing in a person’s unconscious. This means that the person’s basic-wish disregards civil living and is rather only focused on self-interest. Thus, this kind of focus is less on the outside power and more on unconscious underpinnings and is where all the primary emotions ply their trade by supporting one’s basic-wish.

Acting-out is seen as the first symptom to appear in man from the dawn of human evolution. This relates to the fact that all organisms implicitly understand that the world is a predatory environment. Ergo, a natural inclination is to believe it possible to seek some powerful outside source such as a rain God or any magical attribution of one sort or another in order to gain relief from the tension impacted from this predatory world.

The main isssue here is the confrontation betweeen not recognizing that consequences of behavior are in the self, especially with respect to a panic-stricken population in need of immediate relief. This is related to the psychology of anger as seen with respect to its role in all of psychopathology ─ especially with respect to the inevitable disappointment of not being able to have one’s wishes always gratified. Therefore, “repression” and “concealment” (concealing in one’s unconscious domain that which the person doesn’t want to know) emerge as key issues of acting-out. In this sense, in the chapter is also considered the unconscious in the context of the birth of psychological symptoms.

Psychoanalytic and theological perspectives are brought to bear on the entire issue of the vicissitudes of the unconscious and its relation to acting-out.