ABSTRACT
The work reviewed in the last chapter culminates in a riddle. How can the abundant evidence of neuropsychological impairment in schizophrenia be translated into a theory of its symptoms, many of which cannot be understood as deficits? Put in a slightly different way, if brain damage causes neuropsychological deficits, why does it not routinely also result in schizophrenic symptoms? One way of solving this riddle is by means of what has become known as the cognitive neuropsychological approach to schizophrenia (Frith, 1992) or cognitive neuropsychiatry (David, 1993; Halligan and David, 2001). The seeds of this approach are in fact contained in the above two questions themselves, both of which are oversimplifications: some symptoms of schizophrenia are deficits, and the gulf between other schizophrenic symptoms and the signs of brain damage may not be as wide as customarily thought.
