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While admitting that sociological factors may not be the only important cause of schizophrenia, the author presents a sociological theory as a possible explanation of the disease.
Although insanity exists in primitive cultures, the proportion of schizophrenia to other mental diseases is markedly greater in civilized cultures. Besides the fact that primitive cultures have a slower rate of change and have fewer traits to which to adapt, two other factors make orientation to the culture easier for the growing child. One is that the family is not an isolated, closely fused unit. The child may treat many as mothers and fathers in the tribe. Secondly, the child is considered as a potential adult and trained in life from the beginning, so that becoming adult has relatively few unknowns.
In contrast, civilized cultures, as well as having a more rapid rate of change and more factors, have a strongly knit family life with a tendency to protect the child from outside influences, and the emphasis in education is in the direction of profession rather than knowledge of life. He therefore has few things on which he can depend for adult orientations. In the presence of this disorientation schizophrenic thinking appears. Rituals and modes of thinking similar to schizophrenia appear in primitive people in a similar situation: i.e. when confronted with phenomena towards which orientations fail. Schizoid mechanisms can, therefore, be understood 'as an individual or collective primitive attempt to become adapted to a milieu in which one is disoriented, and as an attempt to neutralize the dysphoria resulting from disorientation.'