You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The term “structure” refers in general to the form, the organization, or the order of the parts of a phenomenon. “Structuralism” is a methodological approach in many fields of inquiry (for example, anthropology, psychology, linguistics, sociology, literature, psychiatry, logic) that focuses on the relations between the phenomena rather than on the phenomena themselves. As a method of investigation, structuralism was implied in the work of the early structural psychologists, and it acquired a new and broader meaning in the writings of such modern structural theorists as Piaget, Levi-Strauss, and Chomsky, as well as in the ambitious efforts of general-systems theory to formulate a unified theory encompassing all living and non-living systems. In psychiatry, structural views have been expressed by authors such as Goldstein, Angyal, and Arieti, to name a few, primarily in reference to the thought processes in schizophrenia.
In this paper, by adopting the structural point of view, I shall attempt to interpret in a new light such diverse phenomena as the structure of hallucinations in schizophrenia, the structure of schizophrenic awareness, and the intricate relationship between affectivity and communication and thought in schizophrenia.
The nature and mechanisms of hallucinations in schizophrenia and other psychopathological conditions have been poorly understood, although there are a great number of interpretations of these experiences, ranging from very simplistic ones to very complex neurophysiological models and metapsychological speculations. Hallucinations are false perceptions, and as such, I suggest, they may be accessible to the same methodological approach used by Gestalt psychology for the study of other perceptual phenomena.
The perceiving subject, according to Gestalt psychology, has the tendency to organize the data of the sensory field into a meaningful configuration or pattern (gestalt). Furthermore, Gestalt psychology holds that the concept of gestalt, as a