7th November 2023

Normal Thinking

In 1967, the British Psychiatrist Frank Fish published the first edition of what would become an extensively re-editioned book: Clinical Psychopathology: Signs and Symptoms in Psychiatry. Within this, he described 3 types of thinking which can be viewed as the functions of thinking, i.e. the reasons why we think:

• Undirected fantasy thinking – Also known as autistic or dereistic thinking. This is essentially like daydreaming, and an example would include: ‘I wonder what elephants would eat if they had fingers.’ It usually only lasts a short time, such as when one is bored or about to go to sleep. It can allow us to get away from reality temporarily. Different types of experiences fall into fantasy thinking, including pathological lying (pseudologia fantastica), conversion disorder, dissociative disorder and delusions in affective psychoses (the content of which are dependent on the patient’s affective state at the time).
• Imaginative thinking – This remains within the realms of possibility and extends up to the rational. For example, ‘What will I eat for dinner?’ Imaginative thinking comprises a) Mental imagery: thinking of an image in one’s mind; b) Counterfactual thinking: shifting one’s thinking of reality to think of things that have not happened yet in life; and c) Symbolic representation: the use of concepts to exemplify real world objects, such as what happens when we use algebra in mathematics or symbols in sheet music.
• Rational thinking – Also known as conceptual thinking. This type of thinking is an attempt to solve a problem, i.e. it is logical. For example, ‘What ingredients do I need to make dinner tonight?’. Another example is heuristics, or put simply mental shortcuts. These are shortcuts that our mind creates without conscious effort, using rational thinking to make our lives easier. They are not guaranteed to succeed, but there’s a good chance that they will. For example, if losing one’s phone at home, one could explore every room, and we would be guaranteed success. However, what we actually do to save time is create a mental shortcut by starting our search in the room we were in last or the room we are in most often, as the chance of finding the phone with this method is likely to be faster. Rational thinking requires the person to have the capacity to form mental concepts.

References

• Fish, F. (1967). Clinical Psychopathology: Signs and Symptoms in Psychiatry Bristol: John Wright.