Schizophrenic thinking:

Von Dormarus called schizophrenic reasoning paralogical because patients would call stags and Indians braves the same thing because they were fast.

Arieti called this mode of thinking “paleological” because it, in essence, was the result of lower forms of consciousness like those found in higher animals, children, brain-damaged, and preliterate human beings.

Norman Cameron called this mode of thinking “over-inclusive,” referring to the tendency to put bats and claws in the category of birds. Calling an orange and a banana similar because they both contained atoms.

Selective Attention, a breakdown of mechanisms by which the mind is not able to screen or filter out thoughts or perceptions that are irrelevant to the activity at hand.

Goldstein claimed that schizophrenics last “generic words which signify categories or classes.” Here, patients in an object-sorting task would put a screwdriver, pliers, and a toy hammer together because

1. they could smash things,

2. they all belong in a toolbox, or

3. they’re all silver. Not because they are tools.

Over-abstractness: Typical schizophrenic responses on a similarities test, for example, include the description of

1. “orange and banana” not as fruit… but as “nature’s produce”

2. “coat and dress” as items that “maintain human modesty”

3. “fly and tree” as things that “occupy space in the world”

4. “air and water” as “states of molecular density”

5. “table and chair” as “objects in the universe”

6. Objects may be grouped together according to forms of energy.

7. a candle is referred to as a “night illumination object”

8. a watch: “time vessel”

9. dustpan “domestic utensil”

In general the bizarreness of these classification modes is the highly personal nature of their foundations.

Diagnosis test:

- patient picks out the sink stopper, padlock, and circle of red paper because they all “stopped flows or processes” –the red circle stood for a red traffic light
- another patient put together an umbrella, whistle, and trumpet because they were “noise-producing objects”
- patient picked out a pencil and a show saying that both “leave traces”
It is said that these patients have an unusual manner of allocating attention—a quality derived from their impractical and goalless orientation to the world.

The errors made by schizophrenics doesn’t correlate to the difficulty of the task.

It appears that schizophrenics tend to enter each situation as if almost anything were possible—thus manifesting what has been called the “pathological freedom” of schizophrenic thinking.

They treat probable and theoretically probable events similarly. Because there was a chance of something happening, it occupies their thoughts with the same urgency that a highly probable event occurring. It is a hypothetical attitude that’s open to all formulations of stories. They refuse to ignore these possibilities and continue to fluxuate between different modes of categorization instead of deciding on one.

Rorschach test: Two perspectives appear simultaneously.

1. One patient can’t decide whether he sees ladies or poodles,
2. another described two people… one minute this appears like their eyes and the next this appears like their entire body holding on.”
3. A third perceived “a bat flying away;” then looking at it again, said “a bat coming toward me.”
4. one patient perceived the red dot as blood and an island, so it was a bloody island
5. it reminds me of a dog and a rug… it’s a dogrug.
6. butterfly and world: a butterfly holding the world together.

David Rapapor and his co-authors said that schizophrenics frequent shifting among conceptual frames of reference that are not regulated with each other leads to a loss of “solidarity and coherence.” They lack “automatic steering.” They constantly shift between perspectives and modes of thought in order to exercise volition. (130)One theorist has described as a characteristically schizophrenic tendency to shift not merely among a variety of objects or topics by among alternative frames of reference, universes of discourse, or semantic strata (Foucault’s heteroclite) (131)

Adolf Wölfli: If consciousness were described as a flashlight. A manic would wave it around the room without any clear reason. A schizophrenic’s flashlight would jump out of his hands and shine on the same point from different angles.

S.S. Reich and J. Cutting said that “schizophrenics are idiosyncratic, unique, inappropriate or bizarre in their responces… any further elaboration isimpossible.” (133)—they basically gave up.

Kurt Goldstein: He addresses the reversal of the normal figure-ground relationship between objects and surrounding space, described by one schizophrenic as follows: “The air is still here, the air between the things in the room, but the things themselves are not there any more.” This implies concreteness and dedifferentiation… the coming into the foreground of the ground instead of the figure… the sudden and nearly permanent fluxuation between figure and ground… inability to maintain adequate boundaries… vagueness of boundaries. (136)

“blooming, buzzing confusion of infancy” (136)

+ shouldn’t I say something about how all of these theories suppose a subject… a beingness… a human being.