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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Testimony of Schizophrenia,
By
This review is from: Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (Study in Existentialism & Phenomenology) (Hardcover)
Famed psychiatrist R. D. Laing gives a study of eleven families and thier children whom are schizophrenic. Laing gives no interjections, but rather lets the conversations that the families have amongst themselves give their own testimony. Laing lets the reader know where language patterns occur, in which he believes is largely due to the psychic split. The "double bind" theory introduced by Gregory Bateson, in which the child has been given mixed messages. In the cases given, the studies are all female, and the mothers are usually the aggressor, while the father the passive, and if other siblings are included, they usually side with the mother against the sibling. Shocking, sad and enlightening all together, Laing gives a great look on how schizophrenic in this light can and does occur. Highly reccomended and should be read by all psychologists entering or in the field (it is a shame that this book, like so many of R.D. Laings books are out of print). One should include with this book Gregory Batesons "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" which includes the essay which explains the "double bind."
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Doublespeak & the Duty Victim in the Family as Mind Control Cult,
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Gregory Bateson and Robert Lifton figured out the mechanisms. Salvador Minuchin and Stephen Karpman figured out the systems of triangulation. Ron Laing and Aaron Esterson documented it all right here.
There really are a lot of "great books" in this field, but this one stands out as an absolute must for anyone who'd call him- or herself a "master" of family therapy. We can't say for sure if the authors saw the crazy-making ("schizogenic") family as a half-conscious, mind control cult run by parents trapped in religious and cultural "common sense." But they surely understood Karpman's notions of covertly controlling rescuers, crafty persecutors and duty victims in family systems where the parents believe to their very core that the painful memories and emotions they suffered in their own crazy-making families of origin are "intolerable." In the service of affective "stuffing," these people infect their children with the contagion they contracted in their own psychogenic youth. Alice Miller was asked by an interviewer if she'd read Laing. She had. She went no further, but it's clear in her own work that she saw all this in her "Prisoners of Childhood." As valuable as Miller's many books have been for a generation of therapists, however, none of them illustrate her notions of "for your own good" and "thou shalt not be aware" as well as this one. The crazy-made parents need a crazy child upon whom to project all of their intolerable guilt, shame, worry, remorse, regret and grief for the suffering of their own childhoods. Fortunately, most of them are insufficiently gifted to be able to maintain the say-one-thing-and-then-say-another borderline organization that these eleven pairs of earnest dingbats and denial experts perpetrated on these eleven young women. That said, I have encountered dozens of people who came from families like these: some poor and truly clueless; many wealthy and smugly certain of their righteous rectitude and poisonous pedagogy. The children of the former stand a better chance in most cases. For in the latter, the parents often have too much legal and political power to break through, and too much sophistication to overcome the persecuting control over their adult children's lives that is seen by those parents as so crucially vital to their own emotional well-being. As Claudia Black and Alice Miller put it, these familes force their children to live for their parents' narcissistic benefit, and not the other way around. These children are made to be stand-ins for the guilty grandparents who drove their parents crazy. Being sacred objects of the Fourth Commandment, those grandparents cannot be indicted, tried or convicted. So the kiddies take the rap. Do some parents see the intolerable image of themselves in their own children, refuse to accept the truth, and imitate their own abusers? =Bet= me.
14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Madness and Sanity is Bio - Logical,
By
This review is from: Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (Pelican) (Paperback)
That is to say there are logical means to schizophrenia, and nothing that confers to a physical disability. An amazing study of eleven families and the children who are hospitalized because of their "illness" (incidentally noted, they are all female patients). Dr. Laing and Dr. Esertons account of schizophrenia all points to the facts that this mental illness is not a physical impairment, but a distrust in a persons reality, through communication, through insecurity of beliefs and senses. Schizophrenics choose logically and intelligently under the confines of family life with the parents (who are more delussional than the patient). Although this book is primarily a psychological study, it reads like a novel.
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