Discussion

Dr. Sheiner begins her paper with a definition of her concept of communicating, pointing to the network of interrelations between communicating, thinking, language formation and socializing. This will be helpful in understanding the fact that with the psychotic's withdrawal from people, there will be progressive distortion and loss of communicating, thinking and socializing.

Dr. Sheiner devotes a large part of her paper to cultural and familial influences on the child's development. When she speaks of the inhibiting and potentially dangerous influence of our culture on the child's forming of patterns for living and communicating, she comes very close to Dr. Horney's way of thinking. She aptly brings into focus the cultural tendency to place emphasis on the abstract or conceptual mode of living, while discouraging the experiential mode and inhibiting the expression of strong feelings and sensations, especially those pertaining to body functions and body needs. Cultural and parental influences will channel the child's ways of communicating into conventional patterns which might inhibit the free unfolding of his uniqueness and stereotype his ways of communicating, relating and expressing himself. When Dr. Sheiner speaks of the loss of the capacity for direct and clear feelings, we are reminded of what Dr. Horney described as alienation from the self which is the starting point for the development of neurosis and psychosis.¹ Fromm states that we do not watch an eclipse of the moon by looking out of the window, but rush to our television screens instead; that we do not drink Cola Cola or use tooth paste but consume the advertisement (“The pause that refreshes; The dental cream that prevents tooth decay.”); that we smoke a “50-cent cigar” and cross a “3-million dollar bridge.” Nothing is experienced directly, but the abstract value is of primary importance.’

Since patients and doctors are all products of the same culture, it takes a special kind of therapist to understand t