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The Language of Schizophrenia: a Review and Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Brendan Maher
Brendan Maher*
Affiliation:
Professor of Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts 02154
*
Present address: Institute of Clinical Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Fiolstraede 10, Copenhagen K, Denmark
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Extract

Psychopathologists have tended to regard the phenomena of schizophrenic language as reflections of a more basic disturbance of thought. Writings on these topics generally link them together (e.g., Kasanin's Language and Thought in Schizophrenia, 1944). Critchley (1964), from his survey of major aspects of psychotic speech, concluded that the ‘causation of schizophrenic speech affection lies in an underlying thought disorder, rather than in a linguistic inaccessibility’. Differences of opinion are evident as to what the nature of this thinking disorder might be. Regression (Gardner, 1931; Kasanin, 1944), excessive concreteness of thought (Goldstein, 1944; Milgram, 1959) and deficiency in logical deductive reasoning (Von Domarus, 1944) are some of the more prominent hypotheses to be found in the literature relating to this problem.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 120 , Issue 554 , January 1972 , pp. 3 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1972 

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Footnotes

∗

Although the major development of the concepts of information and redundancy was achieved by the work of Shannon, Rubin had already performed studies and reported his ideas on these problems in the late 1920s at the University of Copenhagen. For a published version of his writings on redundancy the reader is referred to Rubin (1956).

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