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In the course of analytic treatment «we swim or drown in an ocean of action… even when nothing seems to be happening», claims Greenberg , and this is true of both patient and analyst: the patient communicates not only with words, but also with posture, movements, tone of voice, and action; the analyst, in turn, «does» many things: opening the door, saying hello, (not) shaking the patient's hand, various practical communications; and in these circumstances inevitably reveals to the patient something of his style and, consciously or otherwise, makes evident aspects of himself which the patient acknowledges and which combine with transferential elements in composing that complex mosaic which is the (conscious or unconscious) representation that the patient has of the analyst in the breast of the analytic relationship. Even the mere belief that there is or is not something to be interpreted belongs to the realm of «doing», and substantial levels of «action» can also be expressed in «interpretations» (Turillazzi Manfredi, 1978). On the other hand, words do not only have an expressive valence, but also a pragmatic dimension; and it is not just the content of words that plays an integral part of «speaking», but also the intention with which they are uttered, the tone, the pauses, the emphases, the prosody.
While by no means ruling out the possibility that action may constitute an opportunity for the recovery of repressed unconscious material, Freud, as is well known, used the term agieren essentially to refer to situations in which action replaces thought, setting itself up in resistance to the analytic work (Freud, 1914, 1938), and to that «remembering» which constitutes its ultimate aim. In the Freudian vision, action or behaviour as an expression of resistance to the process of treatment, even before it is censured, becomes the object of interpretative analytic intervention aimed at preventing its anti-therapeutic effects.