ABSTRACT
Confabulatory thinking is generally taken as an indication of cognitive impairment or thought disorder, regardless of whether one’s frame of reference is neurology, psychiatry, or psychodiagnostic testing. Verbal confabulation implies a filling in of gaps or erroneous overgeneralization from part to whole, leading subjects to form sometimes far-reaching conclusions based on inadequate data. However; a number of conceptual and semantic issues have made the term more complex and difficult to understand and have contributed to confusion, controversy, and a lack of clarity when attempting to discover the meaning and clinical implications of the term. In this chapter, I review and attempt to deconstruct the term “confabulation” so that its clinical roots, dimensionality, and nuances of meaning can become clearer and hopefully more diagnostically useful.
