Introduction
Psychopathology --in the European meaning of the term -- focuses on signs and symptoms of mental disorders, tries to describe, operationalize and systemize them, for example, in a hierarchical model. Much emphasis has been laid during the past decades on the development of so-called 'explicit criteria' for schizophrenia and depression. Essentially, the approach involves defining a concept in terms of a set of operations that are performed in a prescribed way in order to derive an explicit definition of a disorder, even in cases where the underlying pathology is obscure.
The advantages of 'operationalism' lie in the fact that diagnoses can be produced in a reproducible way all over the world. On the other hand, the disadvantages of ‘operationalism’ consist in its arbitrariness: small changes in the set of operations may lead to significant changes in the resulting classification of patients (Jamison, 1993).
Ego pathology In an empirical study that was conducted in the last two decades, the self-experience of 552 DSM-III-R schizophrenics was tested by the Ego Pathology Inventory and elaborated into a monograph, 1995. Probands with the diagnosis of borderline personality disorders and depression served as a control group for comparison. The monograph encompasses studies of reliability and arguments for validity of the Inventory together with a series of model guided hypotheses which were tested in the experiment, the most important of them being the confirmatory factorial analysis, which yielded a high percentage of congruence between the model and empirical data. External measurements of psychopathology, ego functions, basic disorders, speech and language parameters confirmed the correlation between severe ness of ego pathology (Goodwin, Jamison, 1990).
Longterm follow-up of functional psychoses
Although the notion that hereditary factors play a role in the genesis of psychiatric disorders is generally accepted today, the nature and the magnitude of genetic effects are......................
