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We once heard the statement that to study schizophrenia was to study the complete mental history of mankind, all more or less dismembered and lying about in single units or in partial structural mental conglomerates. The speaker used, now a geological metaphor, when he picked out one thought fossil after another in the phyletic organization of the mental history of the human organism, then switched to the more commonplace garage and pointed out how one bit of machinery after another, some single pieces, some whole structures were out of adaptation, and made sweeping and sharp analogies between the internal combustion engine to the damaged mechanisms which in the aggregate we labelled schizophrenics.
Anything to do with schizophrenics therefore claims the particular attention of that group of mental mechanisms called psychoanalysts, or preferably, psychiatrists psychoanalytically aware and trained. For the first time in the history of the mental sciences, as we see it, this group comes near striking bottom. In the geological metaphor spoken of, they have gone deep down into the cut and systematically mapped out the biological story from its physico-chemical metabolic beginnings, through its sensorimotor-neural integrations to its masterly symbolizing mental discharge powers, or, in the language of the garage mechanic, they got through the outside of the machine, its chassis, its streamline conscious outside, so dear to the academic psychologist, the schoolman, even the theologian-philosopher, and entered into the actual works—the guts, if one will, of the personality.
Hence our interest here in this book, not alone as a most ingenious attack upon the schizophrenic disorder, of itself of transcendent importance, perhaps the most important single new adventure in the psychiatric therapy of the decade, nor as a more measured, more controllable pharmacological dismembering tool, either to pick out isolated thought fossils with lots of mental machinery, but as offering a un