Writing Instead of Screaming: For a Clinical Diagnosis of Orality in Dementia

This paper aims to explore a specific modality of orality in demented patients. Orality is indeed a function that goes beyond food and concerns the use of speech. We offer to study one of the most common behaviors in geriatric institutions, screaming, which should be regarded as an expression of the voice resulting from the loss of language at an advanced stage of dementia. We shall compare this particular form of “oralization” with the writing work proposed during a workshop, and show how writing could be a barrier to excessive pulsional pleasure which invades the body, and whose vocal emanation is the scream.