[Anticipation by schizophrenics (1)]

Man is forever constructing his future. It is this essential phenomenon that the author studies, calling it anticipation. With schizophrenic patients, anticipation does not disappear, it alters, deviates and can no more continue its regulating and motioning functions. In "delusive" forms or stages (the so-called productive moments, with intense processing activity), the real world is overthrown, subverted, and anticipation which has lost its spatial and temporal references, is dissipated in incoherent constructions. In simple schizophrenia or hebephrenia, the anticipation in reality is felt to be dangerous, obliterated by anxiety: autism sets up a mode of protected anticipation: apparent emptiness, delimitation of a security area or imaginary construction of the paraphrenic type. Psychotherapy, as an indispensable complement to chemotherapy, should be guided according to these different types of anticipation.