THE PERFORMANCE OF SCHIZOPHRENICS ON SOCIAL CONCEPTS1

IN RECENT years there has been a growingtendency to view schizophrenia as athinking disorder. This impairment of thought processes in schizophrenia has been demonstrated in both verbal tasks (1, 19, 21, 22) and performance tasks (3, 4, 14, 20), and has been characterized by some as an inability to generalize or to form concepts. However, the origin of this impairment is as yet open to conflicting interpretations. For example, Vigotsky (20) believes that the disturbance in concept formation is caused by an underlying organic process. Goldstein wrote in 1939, "this similarity (in test per-formances of organic and schizophrenic cases) does not permit the rash assumption that schizophrenia is fundamentally an organic disease; the great differences in the behavior of organic and schizophrenic patients in various directions will prevent such conclu-sions. However, the similarity points to an organic process as cause of this impairment, whether this process be primary or of secondary origin " (11, p. 583). In a later publication (12), however, Goldstein seems to view the problem as currently indeterminate. Both Goldstein and Vigotsky stress the general nature of the defect. Indeed, Goldstein con-siders the abstract and concrete attitudes not merely as cognitive functions but as "capacity levels of the total personality, each furnishing the basis for all performances on a certai