Sometimes it is not a verbal stereotype -- a ``How are you now?'' or an ``I want to go home,'' or whatever -- but a nonverbal one which reveals itself, gradually, as the condensed expression of more than one latent meaning. A hebephrenic man used to give a repetitious wave of his hand a number of times during his largely silent hours with his therapist. When the therapist came to feel on sufficiently sure ground with him to ask him, ``What is that, Bill -- hello or farewell?'' , the patient replied, ``Both, Dearie -- two in one.''

Of all the possible forms of nonverbal expression, that which seems best to give release, and communicational expression, to complex and undifferentiated feelings is laughter. It is no coincidence that the hebephrenic patient, the most severely dedifferentiated of all schizophrenic patients, shows, as one of his characteristic symptoms, laughter -- laughter which now makes one feel scorned or hated, which now makes one feel like weeping, or which now gives one a glimpse of the bleak and empty expanse of man's despair; and which, more often than all these, conveys a welter of feelings which could in no way be conveyed by any number of words, words which are so unlike this welter in being formed and discrete from one another. To a much less full extent, the hebephrenic person's belching or flatus has a comparable communicative function; in working with these patients the therapist eventually gets to do some at least private mulling over of the possible meaning of a belch, or the passage of flatus, not only because he is reduced to this for lack of anything else to analyze, but also because he learns that even these animal like sounds constitute forms of communication in which, from time to time, quite different things are being said, long before the patient can become sufficiently aware of these, as distinct feelings and concepts, to say them in words.