Some Comments on Intervention in Psychotherapy

It is indeed a great pleasure to contribute to this symposium on Intervention in Psychotherapy. It is a pleasure for personal reasons, as well as reasons pertaining to the subject matter itself. When several years ago, I instituted a program in the treatment of schizophrenic patients, which highly accentuated the motif of intervention, it aroused considerable question and not a little acrimony. Not that my own program was the first effort at intervening actively in the schizophrenic process, but it came at a time when the hallmark of treatment in this area was characterized by the word “permissiveness.” Permissiveness represented both a misnomer and a misunderstanding. I believe that, in my own way, I contributed to the denouement and eventual death of that particular approach to the schizophrenic patient. But concepts die hard and I am sure this one still lurks very much in the minds of many people.

At the time I initiated my project,1,2 it was, I believe, the first to introduce the idea that what was missing in the environment of, and approach to, the schizophrenic patient was a sense of order and of structure to replace the internal chaos and external randomness of the environment. The premise on which this approach was based arose out of the idea that a sense of “anomy” had been imposed upon the schizophrenically behaving individual as a result of “preemption” by those in his environment. Preemption means here