ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes schizophrenia as a morbid process characterised by the “splitting of the mind”, resulting in an increasing withdrawal of interest from the environment (introversion) together with “a disorder of feeling, of conduct and of thought”. Adolf Meyer, one of the chief exponents of the psychological point of view, regards schizophrenia “as the outcome of progressive maladaptation of the individual to his environment”. In his view it is an extreme manifestation of a probable “reaction type”—”the end-result of an accumulation of faulty habits of reaction”. The schizophrenic symptomatology in the form of acts or activities incongruous to nature, age and status was suggested by the fact that before this interpretation had fully linked up in mind.
