Thought form Vs. thought content

I think that Bou Jidra is writing as if he dreams. Also Silvador Dali had drawn his paintings as if he was dreaming, to jump above the obstacle of repression, and declare the naked truth. Regarding the way that we, students of psychiatry, study thinking, we divide a thought into a content, and a form. In Fish’s psychopathology, our best text of psychopathology, there is also disorder of the stream of thought (tempo and continuity). Schneider suggested that there were three features of healthy thinking: 1. Constancy: this is the characteristic persistence of a completed thought whether or not it is simple or complicated in its content. 2. Organization: the contents of thought are related to each other in consciousness and do not blend with each other, but are separated in an organized way. 3. Continuity: there is a continuity of the sense continuum, so that event the most heterogeneous subsidiary thoughts, sudden ideas or observations which emerge are arranged in order in the whole content of consciousness. The patient last week, Mr. F, when interred the ward, started playing sport, some patients joined him. He refused to stay one day unshaved, some patients joined him. He made a list of things he wanted the hospital to provide for him. On of the seniors said: some people with formal thought disorder may have beneficial thought contents. That saying by that senior, sparked contradictory thoughts in my mind, I argued my self again and again, sometimes am with what he said, sometimes am against it. As an ordinary academic student of psychiatry, I got to be against what he said. But. I remembered how I was always confused about what some artist do. Let us take for example, Rashid Bou Jidra, an Algerian novelist, and a writer of scenario also, one of the scenarios is that for the film of L’akhthar Hamina: sineen il jamr. Bou jidra, write long novels, with sometimes a complicated form, to a degree that I can say, with a type of formal thought disorder. But it carries a content that is full of meanings. Of surprises. Of lights focused into dark dots in our consciousness. Bou Jidra, himself, was admitted once to a psychiatric hospital. He wrote about that experience a novel called “el ra3an” . many of his novels talks here or there about an admission to a psychiatric hospital, or being mentally ill. If we talk about dreams, it is full of formal thought disorder. But reality in dreams sometimes is so deep, so intense, more than reality in awakening. We can find in dreams that we don’t like this person, or we are afraid from this trip, a revelation that appears in dream, but it hides itself in awakening. I think that Bou Jidra is writing as if he dreams. Also Silvador Dali had drawn his paintings as if he is dreaming, to jump above the obstacle of repression, and declare the naked truth.