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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.

Although the development of factor analysis has led, at least operationally, to more precise description of the field of human cognition, controversy as to the nature of intelligence has not ended, although there has been a marked narrowing of the differences between extremes of view. On the one hand, the monarcheal, or single factor idea, has been superseded by Spearman's two factor theory which has in turn been extended to the consideration of group factors. On the other hand, the multifactorial approach has been narrowed and refined by Thurstonian Multiple Factor Analysis. The primary Mental Abilities described by this method were found to be intercorrelated giving rise to a second order factor which Thurstone has suggested, may be not unlike Spearman's “g”. Despite this basic disagreement as to the nature of the variable under consideration, results obtained have led investigators to almost complete agreement that what they have measured as intelligence is largely genetically determined.

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