Negative/positive symptoms of schizophrenia: Clinical and conceptual issues

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Abstract
The negative-positive dichotomy of schizophrenic symptoms and syndromes is the current version of ongoing attempts to subdivide the multifarious clinical manifestations of schizophrenia into more simple, homogeneous classes. The theoretical background for the negative-positive distinction in Anglo-Saxon literature is not explicitly formulated, although it rests on a hidden conceptual framework, inspired by metaphysical evolutionary ideas of the functional organization of the mind, originally proposed by Hughlin Jackson. Conceptual aspects and research evidence of this dichotomy are reviewed. Its validity seems doubtful both on conceptual and empirical grounds. The phenomenological approach and neural network models are introduced as a possible framework to study schizophrenic symptomatology.