The Disorder of Consciousness in Schizophrenia

Abstract

The schizophrenic experience is described as an inability to sustain an intentional focus to attention. Attention is captured by incidental details in the schizophrenic patient's environment, and this gives rise to a spurious sense of significance. The patient's inability to direct a train of thought prevents full access to long-term memory so that early components of perception, which are designed to give early warning of threat, are overly influential and unmodulated by further mental processing. These hasty ideas are given delusional conviction when they capture attention and induce a sense of significance similar to the false significance of perception. The schizophrenic patient's lack of control over his mental processes makes him passive in relation to his own thinking. It prevents him from attending to the slight promptings of his subconscious, and when these emotions and intuitions are not amplified by being brought into focus, he loses a sense of himself.