Schizophrenia and the Need-Fear Dilemma: By D. L. Burnham, A. I Gladstone and R. W. Gibson. New York: International Universities Press, 1969, XV + 474 pp., $15.00.

Respectable as it has become again in recent years, the notion of schizophrenia is acceptable to most of us, clinicians and researchers in the field of mental illness, as something of a compromise. As Burnham, author of the theoretical chapters of this book points out, schizophrenia is but a conventional label, a diagnostic umbrella for "diverse and far-reaching" phenomena, difficult if at all possible to account for by means of unitary theory. Burnham and his collaborators actually prefer to speak of "the schizophrenic person" rather than of "schizophrenia," making use of the more operational, Meyerian notion of a "schizophrenic reaction" or "disorganization," which official psychiatry decided to do away with not too long ago.1

Burnham's thesis is that a deficient psychological differentiation and integration in early life results in a vulnerable personality structure, one that predisposes to a schizophrenic reaction. According to this thesis, the person who is predisposed to such a reaction suffers from an "inordinate need and fear of the influence of other persons"—a "dilemma" that not only creates a morbid predisposition, but also accounts for the specificity of the psychotic reaction. All this is in line with the traditional Freudian view of mental illness, the