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Dr. Palazzoli and associates, working as a team since 1972 in the Milan Center for Family Studies, developed and formulated a plan for the treatment of families who have a child or young adult suffering from a "serious mental disorder," and applied it on an experimental basis to fifteen families. Five of the families had children aged five to seven who were exhibiting serious psychotic behavior, and ten families had children varying in age from ten to twenty-two diagnosed as acute schizophrenics of recent origin. The authors emphasize that this book is only a preliminary report and that publication is "undoubtedly premature." Palazzoli emphasizes that the term schizophrenia signifies to her not an illness of an individual in accordance with the traditional medical model, but a particular communication pattern inseparable from the communication patterns observed in the family "in schizophrenic transaction." She believes that the old traditional causal-mechanistic view of phenomena (i.e., behavior and symptoms) employed in medicine must be abandoned and a systemic orientation adopted, representing a new epistemological model largely based on the conception of feedback. This would allow the therapist to see the members of a family as elements in a circuit of interaction in which every member influences the others, but is in turn influenced by them. Therefore it is an epistemological error to say that the behavior of one individual is the cause of the behavior of other individuals within the family system.
The working method comprises a team of four psychiatrists, two women and two men. One heterosexual couple is in the conference room with the family while the other pair of colleagues is in the observation room. From case to case, the couples may alternate or vary roles or partners from observer to direct interaction with the family. Generally, a series of ten sessions for an hour per session at monthly intervals is considered an optimal period for therapy.