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December 15, 2001. Although “Psychoanalysis and Schizophrenia: A Cautionary Tale” ( J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 49/1) was really not about the etiology of schizophrenia, the three responses printed above are concerned mainly with that issue. I was using the illness of schizophrenia as an example of where, in psychoanalytic theory building, the deficiencies in the mother-child dyad in the first few years of life have been considered crucial to the etiology of a disorder. I was asking the question, How do we know what we believe we know about etiology? Can we reliably use inferences drawn from psychoanalytic treatment to conclude that early difficulties are primarily responsible for an illness? Since I believe that biological research over the past twenty years presents a very different picture of the likely causes of schizophrenia, I believe