Schizophrenic individuals appear to have a fundamental defect in the capacity to attend at will to a given element in the environment and to maintain that concentration as long as the perceiver desires. This results in a clinical picture which reflects the style and success of the adaptations developed by the patient to circumvent this defect. Delusional ideation, blunted affect, withdrawal, and depression are examples of such adaptive responses. Electrophysiological studies suggest that in schizophrenic individuals the information-processing which takes place in the lower brain may be variously defective, causing the attribution of affect, motivation, and significance of incoming information to be mishandled. This may represent a basic defect in the lower brain, defects in the cortical instruction to the lower brain, or both. Patterson's paper, in the opinion of this abstractor, may prove of considerable interest to those concerned with psychoanalytic study of psychosis.