‘On alterations in the form of speech and on the formation of new words and expressions in madness’ by L. Snell (1852)

Abstract

This Classic Text is a translation of an 1852 paper on neologisms and other disorders of language in the insane by Ludwig Snell (1817—92). It illustrates the impact on descriptive psychopathology caused by the early nineteenth-century view that language shaped thought and culture. Developed by Herder, Humboldt and others, this view was to govern the way in which disorders of language were to be studied in psychiatry until well into the twentieth century. After World War II, the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’ returned to the view that thought was more important than language. This encouraged psychiatrists to neglect the study of psychotic neologisms per se and consider ‘thought disorder’ as a primary abnormality in schizophrenia.