The crippling behaviors termed schizophrenia arise in infancy and toddlerhood when the child's capacity to distinguish themself from the surrounding world fails to develop normally because of faulty interaction with their mothering figure, who can be the father or another continually involved person. Thus basic perceptual abilities ("sense of self" or who one is; ability to distinguish reality from fantasy; ability to modulate mood) are deficient, causing later problems in the social, education, and vocation spheres of life. Treatment, which is not simple or brief, consists of providing the supportive interpersonal experience which enables re-negotiation of the early differentiation failure, during which ego capacities are strengthened. Drugs cannot accomplish this; only humans can.
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