You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This unique and interesting book about the treatment of schizophrenic patients applies the thinking of Martin Buber and Paul Tillich to group therapy. The author, a theologian, combines an unusual understanding of psychiatry and existentialism with a deeply human theology.
Through the group process reports, he demonstrates the schizophrenic's flatness of living, lack of experiencing, and absence of relating. He clearly shows their initial non-participation in the group situation. After a clear review of the available literature on this problem he offers his expanded view.
Macnab feels schizophrenic individuals are essentially not participating in existence. They are not feeling the essential anxiety about the givens of finitude and estrangement of themselves and Man. They are not experiencing in any of the modes defined by Tillich as the basic structures of being; they are not in space, time, causality, substance; they are not participating in polarities of existence, individuation-participation, dynamics-forms, or freedom and destiny. They are not feeling the givens of being. Their sense of self is either diffused throughout the world, not here, or is accentuated to the point of no relations with the world. There is a distortion of the self-world structure with a loss of a determining center.
The problem is to move each of these people into the world; to enable them to be authentic, they must first experience the “divine economy”: the anxiety, the polarities and the categories. Macnab feels that through group therapy and the experience of relating to other human beings, the schizophrenic person can become a meaningful participant in being. He criticizes Heidegger's contention that authenticity can be found by resolve alone. He believes there must be a form or means to being authentic and this is through relating to others. In the process of self-articulation through relating in the group process, certain specific features emerge.
In the first process, Encounter, there