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AS USED HERE, the term schizophrenia does not refer to a disease within a person, or to an entity somehow apart from the involvement of man with his surroundings. For the purposes of this presentation the word indicates a process of behavioral patterns, reflecting to an as yet imprecisely determined extent previous, present, and anticipated interpersonal, social, and cultural experience. "Schizophrenia" gains meaning as we consider the uniqueness of the patient (whose behavior is schizophrenic), his associates (those with whom he is more or less schizophrenic), the people of his past (with whom he learned how to live and began to manifest schizophrenic behavior), his expectations of the future (which may seem to require the perpetuation of psychosis), and situations in which variations of the disorder appear. In brief, the term may be used to describe a complex of operations in a social field.
We do not now have the data to talk adequately about etiology, and an either-or stand regarding causation is neither tenable nor useful. Recognizing the existence of individual variations in developmental potential, we are concerned here with the concept that the form and degree of realization of human ability is dependent largely upon interpersonal and cultural influences.1
Human behavior, conventional or otherwise, is a reflection of the