The Seba library treats Neologisms in 8 passages, across 6 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Hillman, James, Freud, Sigmund).
“Excellent. The fellow also uses neologisms. Well — I suppose we have an adequately clear diagnosis. Anyway, I wish you a good recovery.”
Jung stages a dramatic scene in which neologism use is cited by a psychiatric authority as clinching evidence of psychosis, ironically indicting institutional psychiatry’s reduction of creative or intuitive language to symptom.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
I am not proposing to cancel our concepts and restore the archaic neologisms of alchemy as a new esperanto for our practice and our dealings with one another.
Hillman explicitly refuses a literalistic revival of alchemical neologisms, instead advocating for an alchemical mode of imagining that restores matter to psychological language without substituting one conceptual system for another.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis
condensation through neologisms, 313–320 … neologisms in Freud’s dream of Rome, 449–451
Freud’s index entries establish neologisms as a formal mechanism of dreamwork condensation, whereby the dream-work fuses multiple latent thoughts into a single invented word.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900thesis
I would seek release in self-invented ones, as for example, wuttas for doves… the distortions of speech in schizophrenia are not to be differentiated from those which occur in dreams.
Bleuler identifies schizophrenic neologism as a patient-reported release from conceptual inadequacy, and crucially equates the underlying mechanism with that of dream speech distortion.
, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, 1911thesis
Woman, single, aged 62, uneducated, medium intelligence. Speech mingled with neologisms.
In his experimental association research, Jung records neologistic speech as a clinical observation marker in a case subject, deploying the term diagnostically within a psychophysiological protocol.
, Experimental Researches, 1904supporting
everyone with any originality at all coined his own terminology, with the result that no one fully understood anybody else.
Jung characterizes alchemical idiosyncratic coinage not as systematic neologism but as the inevitable consequence of working without clear concepts, producing a proliferation of mutually opaque private terminologies.
, Alchemical Studies, 1967supporting
Neologisms, 314, 321
An index entry confirming that Freud treats neologisms as a recurring, specifically indexed phenomenon within his dream theory, cross-referenced to condensation processes.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900aside
The Editor’s Introduction considers this to be a key term of the Last Lectures, which makes translating it a delicate and crucial business.
Benveniste’s coinage of signifiance illustrates the broader problem of technical neologism in semiotic and linguistic theory — the necessity and instability of invented terms when existing vocabulary fails to capture a new theoretical distinction.
, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside