As I have been intimating, in the schizophrenic -- and perhaps also in the dreams of the neurotic; this is a question which I have no wish to take up -- condensation is a phenomenon in which one finds not a condensed expression of various feelings and ideas which are, at an unconscious level, well sorted out, but rather a condensed expression of feelings and ideas which, even in the unconscious, have yet to become well differentiated from one another. Freeman, Cameron and McGhie, in their description of the disturbances of thinking found in chronic schizophrenic patients, say, in regard to condensation, that ``the lack of adequate discrimination between the self and the environment, and the objects contained therein in itself is the prototypical condensation.''

In my experience, a great many of the patient's more puzzling verbal communications are so for the reason that concrete meanings have not become differentiated from figurative meanings in his subjective experience. Thus he may be referring to some concrete thing, or incident, in his immediate environment by some symbolic sounding, hyperbolic reference to transcendental events on the global scene. Recently, for example, a paranoid woman's large-scale philosophizing, in the session, about the intrusive curiosity which has become, in her opinion, a deplorable characteristic of mid twentieth century human culture, developed itself, before the end of the session, into a suspicion that I was surreptitiously peeking at her partially exposed breast, as indeed I was. Or, equally often, a concretistic seeming, particularistic seeming statement may consist, with its mundane exterior, in a form of poetry -- may be full of meaning and emotion when interpreted as a figurative expression: a metaphor, a simile, an allegory, or some other symbolic mode of speaking.