ABSTRACT
The cognitive approach to schizophrenia emphasizes man as an information processor. The information may come from the senses: people are all familiar with the senses attuned to the environment around us—eyes, ears, skin, nose, and tongue—and less familiar with the senses attuned to the internal environment— the stretch receptors in joints and muscles, for example, that comprise kinesthesis, the sense of movement. Schizophrenia is one of the most common and most severe kinds of psychopathology. For more than a hundred years investigators have struggled with the problem, attempting to understand the nature and origins of a set of symptoms that occurs in roughly one person in a hundred. All theories of schizophrenia implicitly assume a particular model of man. They all make an underlying assumption about the nature of man—specifically, that aspect of his life deemed to be crucial.
