Size Constancy and Abstract Thinking in Schizophrenic Patients

Abstract

For many years both clinicians and researchers have been interested in the thought disorders found in schizophrenic patients. Bleuler (4) believed that “weakness” or “looseness” of association was the primary disorder in schizophrenia. However his views were based on the associationist approach to the theory of thinking, which was buried a long time ago by the advent of Gestalt psychology, and even before that by the work of the “Denkpsychologie” school of Würzburg. The founders of the Würzburg School, Külpe, Ach, Watt and Marbe (31, 1, 56, 34) showed conclusively that the thinking process cannot be reduced to association of ideas and they introduced the concepts of “aufgabe” and of “einstellung”, which represented some kind of imageless directional and selective influences in the thought process. A suggestion was made by Paul Schilder (47) that it was this super-ordinate directionality and selectivity of thought process which was affected in schizophrenia. An attempt to apply the principles of formal Aristotelian logic to schizophrenic thinking was made by Von Domarus (17) who found that schizophrenics tended in their propositions to identify the subject with the predicate.