Anxiety and hostility in the manifest dreams of schizophrenic patients

Aside from delusions, hallucinations, and thought disorders, affective disturbances belong to the most prominent symptoms of the schizophrenic process. However, nearly no empirical work has been done on the systematic investigation of the dream affects of patients with schizophrenia. We compared 96 dreams of 19 patients with schizophrenia and an equal number of dreams of 19 healthy controls collected over an 8-week period by means of the Gottschalk-Gleser Analysis Scales. Additionally, central psychopathological syndromes were measured by means of the AMDP-scales each day a patient reported a dream. Although cluster analyses showed general similarities in the organization of dream affects in the two groups, we found differences between patient and control groups in the frequency and intensity of anxious and hostile affects. As in delusions of persecution, patients experience themselves in their dreams more frequently as victims of hostility from outside, which corresponds well with a significantly higher intensity of threat anxieties (death, mutilation). On the other hand, value anxieties (guilt and separation) are found less frequently in the dreams of patients with schizophrenia pointing, together with a less differentiated organization of the dream affects, to the typical affective flattening of residual syndromes.