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The Experience of Reality in Childhood Schizophrenia is a small, clearly written monograph, the work of a dedicated human being who is currently Chief Psychologist of the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. The book is a progress report on the results of a research project started by the author at New York's Bellevue Hospital. The circumscribed area he chose to work with was the psychological experiencing of reality in the schizophrenic child. His object was to develop a clinically useful method of treatment for such children which would obviate relegating them to back wards of State hospitals and help them become amenable to psychotherapy. That he succeeded in doing this so remarkably well is attested to by the results shown in the monograph. A series of case histories with follow-ups and detailed interviews are used to make clear the treatment method.
Des Lauriers began with the observation that, in all cases of childhood schizophrenia he dealt with, a gross disturbance in reality testing was present. He then postulated that the experience of reality in people is a structure gradually built up during the course of individual development, which acts as an underpinning for the personality. This structural foundation is essential for the normal growth of the originally amorphous personality into a differentiated adult. If, however, because of emotional disorder of the mother, the infant's developing self is not allowed to detach itself from her without severe anxiety, the infant will then be unable to move away from the stage of primary narcissism (Freud). Des Lauriers sees reality as that which is dependent on the separation and differentiation functions of the Ego, upon which the psychological existence rests. Each object has to be laboriously delimited for every individual relationship, at least in the beginning.
The book's basic theoretical assumptions are Freudian. The author is less concerned with dynamics than he is with that one aspect of the Ego which he holds