Abstract
The life that people with schizophrenia experience in the acute stage is so different from ordinary people that the reality of their lives is beyond our imagination. The author presented a paper on the psychiatric nursing framework for understanding people with schizophrenia in 1995. The framework consists of two concepts. The first is the concept relative to mental-structure, the other is the process of illness. The aim of this paper is to re-construct mental-structure from the viewpoint of 'self and 'ego'. First, the construction of initial mental-structure will be described. Then similar concepts around 'self and 'ego1 are discussed. Second, the issues of 'self and 'ego' that have been described in the area of philosophy or psychology are discussed. Next 'self and 'ego' are discussed from the viewpoint of psychiatric nursing. Finally, mental-structure is re-constructed as follows; (1) 'ego' is located in the center of 'self. (2) 'self is a functional vessel that has many points of mutual effects connected with external circumstances as well as those dependent on the human body.
