Dream speech  

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In 1906 the famous German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin published a monograph entitled Über Sprachstörungen im Traume (on language disturbances in dreams). In his psychiatry textbook Kraepelin used the short cut Traumsprache to denote language disturbances occurring in dreams. Traumsprache is probably best translated as dream speech (because the literal translation of 'dream language' would easily be confounded with the language of dreams, which refers to the visual means of representing thought in dreams).

Three types of dream speech were considered by Kraepelin: disorders of word-selection (also called paraphasias), disorders of discourse (e.g. agrammatisms) and thought disorders. The most frequent occurring form of dream speech is a neologism.

Kraepelin studied dream speech, because it provided him with clues to the analoguous language disturbances of schizophrenic patients.

Dreaming for psychiatry's sake

In his monograph Kraepelin presented 286 examples of dream speech, mainly his own. After 1906 he continued to collect samples of dream speech until his death in 1926. This time the dream speech specimens were almost exclusively his own. These new dream speech specimens have been published in 1993 in Heynick (in part in English translation) and in 2006 in the original German, with numerous valuable notes added. The second dream corpus has not been censured and dates are added to the dreams. As Kraepelin in 1906 had been collecting dream speech for more than 20 years, he jotted down his dream speech specimens for more than 40 years.

Schizophrenic speech disorder

Kraepelin had been confronted with schizophrenic speech disorder produced by his patients. He called it schizophrene Sprachverwirrtheit or Schizophasie. The problem is - as Kraepelin stated - that we do not know what the patient is trying to express and so can hardly study the schizophasia.

However using the classical dream-psychosis analogy, he tried to study first dream speech in the hope that this would lead to insights into schizophrenic speech disorder. And so Kraepelin got used to recording his dreams, not to interpret them for personal use as in psychanalysis, but to use them for a scientific study. Kraepelin was able not only to record the deviant speech in his dreams, but also the intended utterance (which was lacking in the deviant speech of his patients, who clearly cannot cross the boundary from psychosis to reality). For example most neologisms (the deviant utterance) in Kraepelin's dreams have a meaning (the intended utterance).

Chaika vs. Fromkin

While in the famous debate during the seventies between the linguists Elaine Chaika and Victoria Fromkin on schizophrenic speech, Chaika long held the position that schizophasia was sort of an intermittent aphasia while Fromkin stated that schizophrenic speech errors could also occur in normals, the debate has now been ended because according to Chaika (1995)

I no longer think that error in [schizophrenic] speech disorder should be necessarily equated with the aphasias which result from actual brain damage.

She also thinks that

The interpretation of meaning of such speech can be quite different according to whether it is perceived as resulting from a true deficit in language production as opposed to resulting from failed intention.

Chaika compares schizophrenic speech errors with intricate speech errors, difficultly to analyse. The current Chaika position comes close to Kraepelin's position (1920), who noted that errors as in schizophasia can also occur in normals in dreams.

Fundamental disturbances

Kraepelin pointed out two fundamental disturbances underlying dream speech: a diminished functioning of the Wernicke area, and a diminished functioning of those frontal areas in which abstract reasoning is localized. Therefore individual ideas (Individualvorstellungen) get expressed in dreams instead of general ideas. Among these individual ideas he included proper names in their widest sense.

Rosetta Stone

Kraepelin's bilingual dreams have been compared to a Rosetta Stone. Deciphering of the Rosetta Stone led to the decipherment of other hieroglyphic texts, lacking a translation in Greek as on the Rosetta Stone. Kraepelin has thus chiseled sort of a Rosetta Stone (Engels, 2009).

An example

On August 13, 1923 Kraepelin jotted down the following example of dream speech:

Vi, tafalk!

This is, as Kraepelin informs us, an order to the grave digger, named Vi, to bring the coffin for the body during a funeral. Kraepelin notes, that the neologism tafalk is a shortcurt for German Katafalk (catafalque). Obviously Vi - in the utterance Vi, tafalk - replaces the syllable Ka.

The associative link between Ka and Vi is easy to reconstruct (Engels et al., 2003). Ka in ancient-Egyptian means 'life force' (in Latin vis vitae). So the chain reads: Ka - vis vitae - Vi. The grave digger Vi in the dream is in fact a so-called Ka-servant, who assisted in funerals in ancient Egypt.

References

• Engels, Huub (2006). Emil Kraepelins Traumsprache 1908-1926. ISBN 978-90-6464-060-5

• Heynick, F. (1993). Language and its disturbances in dreams: the pioneering work of Freud and Kraepelin updated. New York: Wiley.

• Kraepelin, E. (1906). Über Sprachstörungen im Traume. Leipzig: Engelmann.

Further reading

• Chaika, E. (1995). On analysing schizophrenic speech: what model should we use? In A. Sims (ed.) Speech and Language Disoreder in Psychiatry.pp. 47-56. London: Gaskell
• Engels, Huub, Heynick, Frank, & Staak, Cees v.d. (2003). Emil Kraepelin's dream speech: A psychoanalytical interpretation. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 84:1281-1294.
• Engels, Huub (2009). Emil Kraepelins Traumsprache: erklären und verstehen. In Dietrich von Engelhardt und Horst-Jürgen Gerigk (ed.). Karl Jaspers im Schnittpunkt von Zeitgeschichte, Psychopathologie, Literatur und Film. p.331-43. ISBN 978-3-86809-018-5 Heidelberg: Mattes Verlag.
• Kilroe, Patricia A. (2001). Verbal Aspects of Dreaming: A Preliminary Classification. Dreaming: Journal of the Association for the Study of Dreams. Vol 11(3) 105-113, Sep 2001.
• Kraepelin, E. (1920). Die Erscheinungsformen des Irreseins.

See also

Kraepelin dreams about Freud's Signorelli parapraxis