The concept of affect logic: an integrative psycho-socio-biological approach to understanding and treatment of schizophrenia.

In this article, the psycho-socio-biologically integrative concept of affect-logic, and its relevance for a comprehensive understanding and therapy of schizophrenia, is briefly presented. This concept has been developed by the author over the past 20 years, on the basis of the literature, of clinical experience and his own research into long-term evolution, rehabilitation, effects of milieu-therapy, and nonlinear evolutionary dynamics of the illness. It postulates, basically, that fundamental affective states (or emotions, feelings, moods) are continuously and inseparably linked to all cognitive functioning (or "thinking" and "logic" in a broad sense), and that affects have essential organizing and integrating effects on cognition. Schizophrenia is understood as an altered mode of affective-cognitive interaction based, possibly, on disturbed (loosened) affective-cognitive connections. This hypothesis leads to: 1) an integrative psycho-socio-biological model of long-term evolution of the illness; 2) a new understanding of psychopathological core phenomena such as ambivalence, incoherence, and emotional flattening; 3) an innovative therapeutic approach based on an emotion-relaxing milieu and style of care; and 4) the hypothesis that schizophrenia could basically be an affective (and not a cognitive) disease, of another kind than mania or melancholia, however.