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Levels of Schizophrenia is a posthumously published work of Albert E. Scheflen, a psychiatrist whose interest in schizophrenia covered both clinical practice and research. He died of cancer at the age of 60 while this book was in production.
His basic idea was to apply general systems theory to schizophrenia and to integrate what he considered to be eight basic levels from the societal to the molecular. The levels are: (1) society, (2) institutions, (3) family, (4) mother-infant dyads, (5) body states and emotions, (6) physiological subsystems, (7) neuropsychological organizations, and (8) neural microstructure and its metabolism.
He believed that his schema would at last lead to an integration on several levels of the multi-faceted and often contradictory explanations offered by the puzzling problems of schizophrenia. However, merely calling something an “integration” or “general systems theory” is not sufficient in itself to guarantee that, in fact, a useful new theory has indeed been created. To this reviewer, the author has simply restated the obvious — that there are many sides to schizophrenia —and his arguments in support of the preferred theory seem unconvincing. His philosophy of science critiques of other ways of looking at schizophrenia applies with equal force to his position as well. Thus his theory, as well as the others, lacks a solid data base upon which to build a tight theory. The best we can do is deal with approximations, and the so-called general systems theory offers a spurious accuracy and a forced integration that we could well do without.
From the psychoanalytic perspective, the book is particularly naive. In the index one finds listed only six pages devoted to psychoanalysis. A representative sample:
Freud () [sic] formulated a metaphor that neatly predicts our most recent views of cortical-limbic-corebrain relationships. He stated that the ego was too weak in psychosis to prevent the emergence of id impulses. In the decades that followed, Freu