Action-thought is the expression of a concrete, creative kind of thought merged with action. This category has its origin in pioneering experiments that illustrate a new scientific principle by which psychoanalytic patients reveal insights they are in the process of acquiring. In the psychoanalytic context, action-thought is creative—and thus quite distinct from resistance, from acting out, or from the thinking that replaces memories dismantled by interpretation. The notion is part of the theory of the autonomous development of narcissism, as worked out by Heinz Kohut and his followers.

Action-thought was first considered by Kohut in The Analysis of the Self (1971), where he spoke of a kind of sublimation presupposing the modification of archaic narcissistic fantasies. He expanded on the idea of nonreplicable scientific experiments expressing the concrete, creative thought of genius in his later work The...