The schizophrenic individual's perceptions are so powerfully influenced by inner events that he often sees and hears what is taking place inside him as if it were occurring outside him. In this regard, he is often described as having weak body boundaries--that is, he seems not to be able to clearly distinguish where he ends and the world around him begins, and he continuously perceptually confuses inner and outer events. This takes the form of visual, auditory, and other sensory hallucinations.

The schizophrenic adjustment to stress is a very low-level, highly regressive one. Instead of trying to cope with problems, the schizophrenic basically closes his eyes to a world that is too much for him to handle and tries to retreat into sleep, or a kind of pseudo sleep. It is fairly common for people having to face a particularly bad day to want pull the covers back over their heads and return to sleep rather than get up and face their problems, but the schizophrenic individual, for whom every day is a particularly bad day, carries this to the extreme of pulling the covers over his head and slipping back into his dreams for much, much longer than just a day or two.

The transparent slumped figure in this image is meant to symbolize the weak body boundaries of the schizophrenic individual. The other figures symbolize the kind of thinking that is often going on in the mind of this inactive, withdrawn, largely non-responsive person. While he may look almost lifeless to others, often he is immersed in a very active inner fantasy life, in which he is not a slumped, sidelined player, but a very important central actor, who either is omnipotent, himself, or sharing in the omnipotence of some super being. Hence. he holds the world in his hands. The distant, remote cityscape symbolizes the schizophrenic's characteristic social withdrawal and isolation. And the odd-looking trees are meant to represent the kinds of distortions that often impair this individual's perception of the world around him.