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The aim of this article is to consider conflict as having no connection with acting out. My hypothesis of the paradox of conflict, emerging from this non-connection, leads me to explore the intersection between the social and the subjective in a new way. Breaking with the continuity of conflict, acting out is a form of discontinuity, a rupture: in the act, there is no longer any conflict. This factor is particularly important for thinking about clinical practice in a prison environment.My argument is based on the Freudian dualism (life drive/death drive) on the one hand and on the Lacanian “ternary” RSI (Real-Symbolic-Imaginary). Freudian dualism shows the importance of the conflict at the unconscious level, while the Lacanian ternary makes it possible to analyse acting out, which I will attempt to elucidate with reference to three clinical vignettes. Thus correctional institutions or prisons, my field of study, has led me to put forward the paradoxical hypothesis that acting out results from the absence of conflict at the unconscious level.