Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse / Band 53: Performance als Restitutionsversuch

Performance is a term which psycholanalysis adopted from art, a term which is said to cover those phenomena which may not be covered by the well-known concepts of enactment and involvement. Performance is defined as an action done to acquire meaning. It takes place wherever the stimulated identity leads to overwhelming processses of countertransference and transference which can be transformed if anything into an interpreted identity only in a co-creation. In this context, performance, in analogy to the well-known concepts, initially represents an area of unrecognized acting which lays itself like a dressing on a wound and bridges the gap between the ego and reality, between the analyst and the person being analyzed. Whereas Freud thought of a gradual increase in the gap, the possibility of closing this is seen here.