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This essay is a synthesis of a number of viewpoints on the schizophrenic process and its relation to narcissism. The author pulls together themes from French writers such as Grunberger, Nacht, Braunschweig, Fain, and Green, as well as his own earlier work. English writers who are considered include Rosenfeld, Winnicott, Little, Macalpine and Hunter, while he considers American views as stated by Searles, Mahler, Kohut, Kernberg, and Jacobson. The result is a learned review of the difficulties threatening the schizophrenic in his encounters with the self and with the object. The theme of a paradox is developed from the concept of the double bind, as one case of many paradoxical binds in which the schizophrenic finds himself. According to Racamier, there is a certain coherence in the means employed by the schizophrenic ego to deal with the reality of things and the object on the one hand, and with the internal reality of self-representations on the other. These methods place the schizophrenic on a path of which the limits are respectively psychotic delusions and narcissistic perversion.
Racamier emphasizes the "anti-conflictuality" of schizophrenics, that is, their