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Evolutionary concepts about the hierarchical organization of the brain and mind dominated schizophrenia during the last hundred years. These theories compared psychotic patients with 'primitive people' and suggested that both do not master rationality, a function of the highest level of mental develop ment. While 'primitives' supposedly never reached this level, psychotic patients were supposed to have lost their higher mental functions in the disease process. Evolutionary concepts thus allowed to construct social hierarchies as biological stages in a unilinear development of the human race. Structures of domination in the colonies were coded as developmental differences. Placing psychotic patients in the position thus defined proved dangerous for the patients, who ulti mately were confronted with the techniques of exclusion and extermination developed in the colonies. Modem psychiatric theories avoid direct comparisons between 'primitives' and psychotic patients. However, the structure of the old hierarchical model has survived in some recent theories that compared psychotic behavior with animalistic instinct reactions or the problems of the 'underclass' with aggression among non-human primates.