Schizophrenia: A Panel

Psychoanalysts treat schizophrenic patients analytically, implying that schizophrenia is one of the directions human development takes under adverse circumstances. We on this panel believe that the various mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, can be understood from a unified theory of personality. Our focus, then, is from within outward, from the underlying processes to the symptoms, granting indeed that the symptoms are striking and bizarre. These symptoms often have been looked upon as either requiring a different order of reasoning for their understanding or as the end result of biochemical and physiological processes in the nervous system. I feel that as more becomes known of cell physiology and biochemistry, we will find that anxiety, rage, hate and love bring about intricate cellular changes which play their part in the overt symptoms. Mental illness can then be seen from the viewpoint of the whole human being in society—and will be seen to be a complicated interplay of many forces.

As yet, schizophrenia is a mystery to us. Its meaning, its nature still elude us. We can give an adequate and communicable description of what we call the schizophrenic process. Even the name has no essential meaning. It is a label which connotes a constellation of conceptions of a process in which a person moves toward greater and greater irrationality and moves further and further away from reality. It connotes a process which brings about in the person so affected distortions of perception, distortions of conception, and distortions of communication so great that the person is no longer like other human beings—he becomes different.

Persons with schizophrenia have certain characteristics and feelings in common. First is what has been called a weakness of the “self-system” by Sullivan1, a weakness of the ego by Freudians, and a weakness of self by those following Horney's theory. Secondly is subjective anxiety accompanied by a sense of isolation, “something missing in him.” Th