ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a psychoanalytic formulation in which schizophrenia is viewed as a form of psychopathology involving conflict between wishes to maintain a psychological state in which meaning can exist, and wishes to destroy meaning and thought and the capacity to think and to create experience. The theory of schizophrenic conflict represents an attempt to address the interface between the sphere of psychological meanings and representations and the sphere of the capacity to create meanings and representations. Sigmund Freud struggled for over 40 years with the question of whether schizophrenia could be conceptualized in the same terms as the neuroses or whether a new set of terms would have to be developed. Between 1894 and 1937, Freud proposed three incomplete but overlapping theories of schizophrenia. Freud's theory retains a conflict-and-defense format involving the wish to withdraw from objects versus the wish to retain relatedness to objects.
