This comprehensive book on schizophrenia repays analytic study. The work uses Dr. Pao's vast experience as a psychoanalyst with the unusually difficult schizophrenic patients treated at Chestnut Lodge. As befits the Director of Psychotherapy at this institution, Pao's endeavor in this book is appropriately broad.

Schizophrenic Disorders reorganizes what T. S. Kuhn, the historian of science, would call the "explanatory conceptual paradigm" of schizophrenia. It places the integrative functions of the ego and the cohesion of the self at the center of that paradigm's assembled data. The schizophrenic's ego, Pao says, finds its integrative functions overwhelmed in the course of conflict. Organsimic panic, an unmanageable terror, ensues which inactivates workable defenses and adaptive ego functions. Primitive ego functions emerge which supplant the inactivated ego. The integrative capacity and the coherence of the self