Familial Relationships of Allusive Thinking in University Students and Their Parents

Rapaport (1945) was the first worker to advance evidence that at least two types of formal thought disorder contributed to the disturbance of thinking found in schizophrenia; and furthermore that neither of these types of thinking was specific to schizophrenia. Rapaport administered the Bolles Goldstein Object Sorting Test to 217 psychiatric patients and to a control group of 54 patrolmen. He found that schizophrenics showed a tendency to function more at a concrete level and less at an abstract conceptual level, as described first by Vigotsky (1934). This tendency was also shown by depressives and by persons who were not mentally ill but had a poor cultural background.