Acute confabulatory psychosis: a rare form of unipolar mania?

Emil Kraepelin's paper on false memories (Erinnerungsfälschungen) was probably the most extensive and incisive analysis of these phenomena ever made. Using his views as a starting point, the concept of confabulation is then defined in a Kraepelin-oriented manner, making it also applicable to the phantastic false memories found in some rarer forms of functional psychotic illness. Kraepelin and Leonhard have been preeminent in their concern with such clinical states; thus, Leonhard's confabulatory euphoria and confabulatory paraphrenia can be symptomatically and syndromally linked up with points of view on paranoid mania and confabulatory paraphrenia held by Kraepelin. An "ideally typical" case is also presented to highlight some of the difficulties involved in trying to distinguish mania from schizophrenia when the clinical picture is dominated by phantastic "functional" confabulations.