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Defenses

Acting Out

Acting out is turning a feeling straight into action, skipping the step of noticing it and thinking it over. The anger, hurt, or longing isn’t held and reflected on. It gets done: an outburst, a slammed door, a reckless choice, a sudden exit. Afterward, when thinking returns, there is often regret.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person “deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by acting without reflection or apparent regard for negative consequences” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). It usually follows events with important people, such as parents, authority figures, friends, or lovers. The DMRS stresses that acting out is not the same as “bad behavior.” Fighting or drug use, for example, counts as acting out only when it shows some link to feelings or impulses the person can’t tolerate.

Acting out protects a person from having to tolerate a painful feeling and reflect on what stirred it up. The feeling is discharged instead. The DMRS notes that it typically involves feelings the person is usually inhibited from expressing; tension rises fast, and the urge goes straight into behavior. The cost is high. The inner conflict isn’t resolved, the action often brings serious consequences, and guilt or fear of punishment may follow, unless another defense, such as denial or rationalization, steps in to excuse it: “I was so angry, I had to do it. It was his fault for stirring me up.”

Where It Sits

Acting out belongs to Level 1, the Action Defense Level, within the Immature Defensive Category. This is the lowest level of the DMRS hierarchy. Action defenses reflect a sense that the source of stress is outside oneself and that the experience is intolerable. They lead “to impulsive action on the environment or oneself, thereby releasing tension, gratifying wishes, and/or avoiding fears,” without anticipating negative consequences. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale also places acting out at its action level, alongside apathetic withdrawal, help-rejecting complaining, and passive aggression.

Among the immature defenses, acting out is grouped with the depressive defenses, a set that research has repeatedly linked with depression.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify acting out:

Examples

Yelling at her father

In a study that rated defenses in research interviews, a woman with borderline personality disorder said of her father: “I can’t control myself when I’m with him. He makes comments I don’t like and I react automatically and we always yell at each other.” The researchers rated this as acting out. Her words capture the sequence: a hurtful remark from an important person, a reaction that is “automatic,” and a fight that repeats, with no pause in between for the feeling to be noticed.

Ueli Kramer, Yves de Roten, J. Christopher Perry, and Jean-Nicolas Despland, Beyond Splitting (2013)

Lear divides the kingdom

At the start of Shakespeare’s play, the aging King Lear asks his daughters to declare how much they love him. His favorite, Cordelia, refuses to flatter him: “Nothing, my lord.” Wounded, Lear disowns her on the spot. When his loyal adviser Kent tries to intervene, Lear warns him, “Come not between the dragon and his wrath,” and when Kent urges him to “check / This hideous rashness,” Lear banishes him too. Within a few scenes, after his eldest daughter turns on him, he admits, apparently of Cordelia, “I did her wrong.” Shakespeare isn’t writing about defenses, but the sequence of a hurt from a loved one, an instant drastic act, heavy consequences, and later remorse closely matches the DMRS description.

William Shakespeare, King Lear (written c. 1605–1606), act 1, scenes 1, 4, and 5

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Passive aggression
Both put feelings into behavior. Passive aggression is controlled and veiled, hiding resentment behind apparent compliance. Acting out is uncontrolled and direct, with no pause for reflection.
Displacement
Displacement redirects a feeling toward a safer target, but the feeling is fully expressed and acknowledged. Acting out changes the channel rather than the target: the feeling skips awareness and goes straight into action, often toward the very person who stirred it.
“Bad behavior”
Impulsive, disruptive, or self-destructive behavior isn’t automatically acting out. The DMRS counts it as the defense only when it is linked to feelings or impulses the person can’t tolerate.
Acting out in therapy
In its original psychoanalytic sense, acting out meant repeating something in action during treatment, instead of remembering it and putting it into words. The DMRS uses a broader definition that includes behavior both inside and outside therapy.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count acting out among their characteristic defenses:

History

The idea began in psychoanalytic treatment. In his 1905 case history of an eighteen-year-old patient he called Dora, Sigmund Freud tried to understand why she had broken off treatment so unexpectedly. He concluded that she had taken revenge on him as she wished to take revenge on another man in her life: “Thus she acted an essential part of her recollections and phantasies instead of reproducing it in the treatment.”

In a 1914 paper on technique, Freud generalized the point. Some patients, he wrote, remember nothing of what is forgotten and repressed, but express it in action: “He reproduces it not in his memory but in his behaviour.” A patient might not remember how defiant he was toward his parents, for instance, but behave that way toward his doctor.

Over time the term widened to cover impulsive behavior driven by unbearable feelings in everyday life. George Vaillant placed acting out among the immature defenses, giving temper tantrums as an example, and noted that defenses can mature over a lifetime: adolescent acting out “could evolve into reaction formation (becoming a strict policeman) and finally into the altruism of a parole officer.” The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) put acting out at the action level. J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales define it as “broader than the original concept of acting out transference feelings or wishes during psychotherapy” and place it at Level 1.

In research, Kramer and colleagues (2013) found that patients with borderline personality disorder used more action-level defenses, the level that includes acting out, than matched healthy controls. In a 2024 network study of 655 adults with depressive and anxiety symptoms, using a self-report version of the DMRS, acting out stood apart from most other defenses, connected only to help-rejecting complaining. Perry and colleagues (2025) list acting out among the immature defenses that studies have strongly associated with depression.

Sources