Interaction of Multiple Determinants of Schizophrenia

Abstract

That other world, whose relationship to the ordinary one is the relationship of the wilderness to the cultivated land. —Kafka Disease is the common result of a variety of diverse external and internal causes. —Pidoux The main purposes of this paper are to consider some of the determining factors of schizophrenia; to suggest a paradigm for their interaction which accounts for both the temporal sequence and energy relationship of the involved events; to show the advantage of regarding schizophrenia as a disturbance of the whole organism in which there is a generalized physiological dysfunction, rather than as a dysfunction of the brain alone; and to demonstrate that the so-called psychodynamic and organic schools of pathogenesis are not so irreconcilable as some suppose. It is emphasized at the outset that many questions raised in this paper probably cannot be answered by direct experiment.