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The schema, or body image, is both a concept and an image, and at the present time has grown to have connection with many branches of modern knowledge. It was first introduced into neurology in 1911 by Henry Head and Gordon Holmes. Since then the concept has been increasingly used in experimental psychology, neurology, psychiatry, and in the analytical types of psychology, especially over the last few years since Schilder's (1935) work on the subject. This flexibility, by which it is of service as much in the psychic as organic spheres that tend to be mutually exclusive or hostile, may be partly attributed to the fortunate circumstance that nobody can say exactly what it is; this leaves it full of possibilities. The possibilities that I shall develop here are of its relation to the third or middle of two things, and its relation to the standards or constants in perception and personality.
The concept of the schema originally stems from Kant, from whom Head evidently derived his concept. In The Critique of Pure Reason, which is largely an analysis of the relationship of inner and outer worlds, Kant discusses the relationship of the concept to the object placed under that concept. He points out that a pure conception of the understanding cannot be applied directly to phenomena since the origin of the two is different. He says of this (p. 117): “Now it is quite clear, that there must be some third thing,1 which on the one side is homogeneous with the category, and with the phenomenon on the other, and so makes possible the application of the former to the latter. This mediating representation must be pure (without any empirical content), and yet must on the one side be intellectual, on the other sensuous. Such a representation is the transcendental schema.”2 This schema is, he says, a product of