ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book speaks that new infants, it is true, are innately considerably more purposeful than had once been thought. Deliberateness of purpose extends, for instance, to the adolescent’s consciousness of their own authority over themselves, and to their often exaggerated assertion of that authority and independence of decision. Obsessive indecision consists, rather, of an agonized alternating between one leaning and another, a process that is full of active, complicated, often quasi-moral thinking. The book explains in detail the self-protective dilution or avoidance of experience of personal responsibility in psychopathology. “Schizophrenia”, takes up the kind of psychopathology in which the loss, or surrender, or suspension of autonomous self-direction takes its most radical forms. The book considers briefly the question of biological origins of schizophrenia, taking for granted that all psychological capacities and vulnerabilities have origins in genetic variations.