The author's point of departure is schizophrenic fragmentation, which has been considered here from a drive-economic and structural point of view, starting from Freud's prestructural conceptions and Jacobson's metapsychological formulations. The view is arrived at in the essay that the central psychological mechanism in the schizophrenic disorder is a drive-energetic decathexis of the basic psychic tissue, or the primal representative matrix, which has far-reaching consequences within the entire psychic organization.

The basic psychic tissue corresponds to that area of inner reality which, according to Freud, remains beyond the primal repression and is made up of the first representations of the instinctual drive. The entire psychic organization has then been woven out of this representational tissue, binding drive energies in a preliminary way.