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The understanding of schizophrenia has been the goal of extensive efforts in research and in therapeutic practice over the past fifty years and more. Controversies still rage over the factors which may or may not be responsible for its onset. The position of this paper is that only now has the point been reached at which the relevance of efforts to understand these disease syndromes, which are labeled schizophrenia, can be demonstrated. The issue revolves particularly around the question of origin — whether psychological, sociological, genetic, or biochemical. In medical circles there is hope that increasingly sophisticated biochemical research on a molecular level will reveal explicitly how the human brain functions. Sufficient experimental evidence has been amassed to prove that each brain functions uniquely. The researchers had to conclude that there are as many modes of thinking as there are thinkers and that, due to the reaction of the growing individual to his total environment, brains are made, not born different. This new hypothesis means that each person perceives the world through his own filters or lenses and that these are as unlikely to be completely shared by another person as fingerprints are. Accordingly, from a neurophysiological point of view, man is not able to comprehend the world objectively. If, for instance, two people witness the same event and come away with two quite different testimonies, the psychological implications might be that they are not distorting reality, nor are they lying, but that they personally might lack access to the real facts since they might not have central nervous system access to undistorted data.
Manfred Bleuler still considers schizophrenia as a psychosis, a genuine mental disease. He describes the evaluation of the diagnosis of schizophrenia as relative to the experience of a mentally healthy person, meaning that a doctor living in a certain culture compares the action and reaction of another person with his own ac