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Sanity, Madness and the Family: Families of Schizophrenics (Study in Existentialism & Phenomenology)

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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."

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.

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.

This book is a series of interview transcripts of the families of schizophrenics, with a forward describing each family situation and the patient. The authors' theory was that schizophrenia in a person could be a result not of illness in the patient, but of family dynamics. To test this theory, Laing and Esterson interviewed the patient's families -- usually the mother, father, siblings, and grandparents if available, as well as the patients themselves.

The interviews certainly show that many jumbled signals were being received by the child; and many factors (projection, denial, extensive control of the child's behavior etc.) were at play.

For example, a patient might say, "I was very unhappy at school... I felt ashamed of my (whatever)," And the mother chimes in with, "You enjoyed math, didn't you?" Even though she and the father actively discouraged the child to study mathematics. Thus the patient stops talking, mystified by this comment which is so at odds with what was actually their experience.... and forgets to pursue their telling the mother about the shame they felt. These poor souls become catatonic, unable to speak or unwilling to.

Often it seems that the parents had a stake in denying the patients their selfhood.

Like Laing's other work, the feeling one comes away with is of empathy and sympathy with the patients, and a feeling that they are not so insane as others think them to be. This is what I take away from Laing's work -- empathy ---- but also a focused look at what could be causing the mental illness.

This wasn't as helpful to me as "The Divided Self," but I still found it to be sobering and in some places humorous, in a sad way, because it was quite familiar in spots, the convoluted way these families "communicated."

My father was Asperger like myself. My mother was schizogenic. Not schizophrenic but schizogenic: A refrigerator mother totally impervious to the needs of her children. Never once in her life did she kiss or hug any of us, and we were raised by the maids. To be fair with her, she did take an interest in us when we were sick. I remember that being sick was like visiting Disneyland.

My brother is schizophrenic and he has spent several years of his life in the loony bin. All my seven sisters are downright crazy. Even if they do not hear voices or see hallucinations, there is something very wrong with all of them. One of them reads the bible 24/7 and speaks "in languages". A couple of them appear on the surface to be OK, but have done things throughout their lives that defy understanding. One let her children hang out with a well known homosexual pedophile, and even wanted to marry him. Another induces her two daughters toward promiscuity. Her younger daughter already has herpes and who knows what else.

Another thing I have to point out is that although all my sisters are downright crazy, none of them is schizogenic. None of them was impervious toward their children, and none of their children ever went crazy. But one of my nieces, the daughter of my bible reader sister, is conspicuously impervious toward her children, and one of her sons is quite weird. I would not be surprised if he goes nuts when he grows up. It fits the pattern.

The shrink I had the misfortune to know, the only thing that interested him was squeezing as much money as possible from his patients with endless sessions of "therapy", and seducing his female patients. One of my sisters fell for him, and she still considers him the love of her life. (I don't believe her late husband ever got wind of this). Some professions breed dishonesty. I consider psychiatrists to be at the top of the list, along with lawyers and politicians. The point of this paragraph being, I believe that bad parenting schizogenia theories became so popular 50 years ago because psychiatrists had an overwhelming monetary incentive: To put the blame of schizophrenia on bad parenting meant tons of money in family "therapy".

Now to the book: Even though bad parenting schizogenia hypotheses have been totally discredited, the scientists' field observations are still valid and genetic schizogenia is a fact of life. The genes of schizophrenia impinge on all family members in varying degrees of severity, and on the mother of the future patient, in this different and strange way.

No need to mention that this book is a must if you want a better understanding of schizophrenia. Even if you do not have the stomach to finish it, you will get a taste of what our families are like.

Schizophrenia is preventable today by giving low doses of antipsychotic medication to the suspected future victim. I cannot help wonder if the same doses would soften the hearts of schizogenic mothers.

PS. I once read on a psychiatric journal at the University of Santa Clara that there are six different types of schizogenic mothers. Unfortunately, I lost the photocopy and after so many years cannot remember the name of the publication. I do remember though that one of the types was the "seductive" schizogenic mother. This is the type that appears on the novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". Ken Kesey couldn't have invented it out of the blue. He must have seen it at the hospital were he worked.

A bright star in the constellation bridging the literary and philosophic psychiatry of the past to the psycho-pharmacological dominated present.