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Paul E. Meehl, PhD
From the Department of Psychiatry, Psychiatry Research Unit, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1989;46(10):935-944.

Abstract
• A conjectured neural integrative defect (schizotaxia), due to a dominant schizogene completely penetrant for a parametric aberration in synaptic signal selectivity (hypokrisia), gives rise under ordinary social learning regimes to schizotypy, a personality showing ambivalence, aversive drift, dereism, autism, and cognitive slippage. Given unfavorable polygenic potentiators (eg, introversion, hypohedonia, and anxiety) and adverse life experiences (eg, childhood trauma or adult misfortune), around 10% develop schizophrenia. That schizophrenia is basically a neurologic disorder does not contradict whatever is known about its psychodynamics, nor preclude efficacy for psychotherapy or other psychosocial interventions. Research should concentrate on soft neurology and psychophysiology as indicators, being closer in the causal chain to the schizogene than psychometric, social, or high-level cognitive processes. Taxometric statistics are appropriate to testing a major locus model not simplistically formulated.

Footnotes
Accepted for publication November 23, 1988.

Reprint requests to University of Minnesota, Department of Psychiatry, Box 392 Mayo, 420 Delaware St, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (Dr Meehl).

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