FOR MANY YEARS I have been uncomfortably aware of the multitude of manifest and latent methodological problems facing the investigator who works with schizophrenics. One thing or another has, however, kept me from facing the facts straightforwardly and attempting, at least for myself, to delineate these as fully as I can. Knowing how often my colleagues and I have fallen short of achieving the "ideal" conditions we implicitly recognized as being needed, I am impressed with the desirability of making these conditions explicit. This explicitness would serve to keep the conditions constantly before one—at least clarifying the goal toward which to aspire. But first permit me to indulge in a little self-analysis. In the course of this discussion, I expect to be shifting about in what may seem to be a somewhat harum-scarum fashion so that the points I make will probably appear