ABSTRACT
What has traditionally been called the course of schizophrenia, asserts the Swiss psychiatrist Luc Ciompi, does not exist, and the development of a person who has once become psychotic must be viewed more as an open life-process, dependent upon a wide variety of biographical and social influences of all kinds, than as a disease process (Ciompi 1980a). In similar terms, Rue Cromwell has argued that the schizophrenic's 'destiny is determined much the same as the destinies of all people are determined' and that schizophrenia is not therefore an 'all-encompassing illness which sets the patient apart from his fellow man' (Cromwell 1978: 646; see also Zubin et al. 1983).
