On the Nature of Schizophrenia: Changes in the Observer as Well as the Observed (1932-77)*

*Reprint requests should be addressed to the author at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, NY 14642. 'With apologies to Samuel J. Beck: The Six Schizophrenias. Research Monograph #6, American Orthopsychiatric Association, Inc., 1954. elusions can come from clinical surveys of patient samples unless the relationship of the selected patients to the source population is carefully controlled. Consider the plight of attempting to make intelligent comparisons of schizophrenic patient populations when one group is from back ward patients who have been hospitalized for long periods and are of low social class origin with negligible social competence at the onset of their illness, and little acquired since, while another patient population is middle class, married with intact family, children and parental responsibilities, and hospitalized for short periods in a psychiatric unit in a general hospital.