BPA Lecture of the Week: Acting Out, Acting In and the Compulsion to Do

This paper explores something of Freud’s original statement on action as a way of repeating what cannot be remembered and put into words, and comments on later developments of this as a communication within the transference relationship which necessitates interpretation of the unthought or unthinkable elements. Case examples of a small patient (age 3), a lad moving into adolescence and an adolescent delinquent hopefully illuminate the achievement of ‘doing’ and the hope that the object will respond to the demand contained within it.

Ann Horne trained as a child and adolescent psychotherapist in the Independent tradition at the British Association of Psychotherapists – now the Independent Psychoanalytic Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Association (IPCAPA) at the British Psychotherapy Foundation - where she served terms of office as head of the training and later of post-graduate development for child psychotherapists. A Fellow of the BPF which she represents on the Board of the British Journal of Psychotherapy, she is retired from clinical work but teaches, supervises and writes: she developed the Independent Psychoanalytic Approaches with Children and Adolescents Series, co-edited with Monica Lanyado and published by Routledge, and was joint editor of the Handbook of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy and of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy. She has a particular interest in the child’s use of the body in delinquency, abusing or seemingly seeking perverse solutions.

Fee - £35