DESPITE several decades of enormous amounts of energetic research in the field of schizophrenia, workers have not as yet reached an operational definition of the subject of their study. A recent report on current diagnostic practices1 dramatically highlights this basic shortcoming. Moreover, schizophrenia research has suffered because investigators from different disciplines have looked, each in turn, at only one part of the proverbial elephant: that is, biochemists, psychologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts, neurologists, and geneticists have looked for single causal factors underlying all cases of schizophrenia. A concerted research effort, however, might show that no single factor is specific in characterizing all schizophrenics, but that, those factors previously studied in isolation in each of the currently most active research areas may each singly or in interaction play some role in any given person's schizophrenic syndrome.
The research on ego functions reported here is part of an attempt to develop