Book Notices

THE ABUSING FAMILY. By Blair and Rita Justice. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1976, 288 pp., $14.95; $5.95 (paperback).

The reader will quickly appreciate the contributions of Rita and Blair Justice as they present their theory of the abusing family, their methods of secondary prevention and of the alternatives of an effective program of primary prevention.

From their experience and from a control study of 35 abusing and 35 nonabusing families the authors note that the abusing family undergoes frequent life crises, especially in the year prior to the actual physical abuse. The parents are overloaded, leading to decreased ability to adjust and control feelings. Each spouse is looking for a symbiotic relationship in which his and her needs might be met. The authors found that "In abusing families there is a constant competition over who will be taken care of. First the spouses compete with each other; when one 'loses' and has to take care of the other, he turns to the child in a last-ditch effort to be taken care of himself. When the child fails to deliver, a lifetime of frustration caused by unmet dependency needs is likely to be unleashed in the form of overt aggression toward the child." An important part of the theory is that the parents' personalities help to precipitate these life crises.

It is further postulated that the development of undifferentiated personalities who are looking for shifting symbiotic relationships is a multigenerational affair, passed down from family to family and resulting in repeated instances of child abuse.

A cursory review of seven different models for explaining child abuse include: the psychodynamic model, the personality or character-trait model, the social-learning model, the family-structure model, the environmental-stress model, the social-psychological model, and the mental-illness model.

The authors' transactional-analysis framework utilizes the concept of Parent (judgmental, opinionated, rule-making), Adult