Sanity, Madness, and the Family - Families of Schizophrenics (Second Edition). By R. D. Laing and A. Esterson.  Basic Books, Inc., Publishers New York.

The purpose of this book is to report the results of an investigation of schizophrenics and their families. The authors intend to show that schizophrenia is more intelligible than usually accepted if it is considered within the context of a group process: the family process.

The authors reiterate in their preface to this second edition, that most of the critics of their book critiziced it from their different points of view and did usually disregard the authors’ point of view. They went on to answer their own questions, disregarding the authors’ question: Is so called Schizophrenia more intelligible if it is considered in its social matrix, namely the family?

The only purpose of this book is to present eleven family reports in a “distilled” fashion keeping the above question in mind. After a brief statement of their methodology, the authors present the families one by one, avoiding any psychoanalytic interpretation or, rather, using the phenomenological method of “bracketing” the theory.

The three basic concepts of Intelligibility, Praxis and Process that were developed by Sartre in his “Critique de la Raison Dialectique,” are the elemental categories of this book; the authors summarize them as follows:

“Events, occurrences, happenings, may be deeds done by doers, or they may be the outcome of a continuous series of operations that have no agent as their author.

In the first case, we shall speak of such events as the outcome of praxis; in the second case, as the outcome of process.

When what is going on in any human group can be traced to what agents are doing, it will be termed praxis. What goes on in a group may not be intended by anyone. No one may even realize what is happening. But what happens in a group will be intelligible if one can retrace the steps from what is going on (process) to who is doing what (praxis).” (p. 8)

Schizophrenic behavior is basically behavior that we observe but don't understand. We sometimes call it bizarre or inappropriate because it seems