Active Concretization

Active concretization is a behavior often exhibited by people with schizophrenia, especially paranoid schizophrenia, which is characterized by directly changing abstract ideas into definite descriptions or representations. For example, a patient with psychosis feels the urge to curse a stranger and he attributes this to the “naughty rascal named Billy” inside his head. Hence, the patient concretized his impulse into someone called “Billy”.