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New York: International Universities Press, 1969, 158 pages, $5.00.
A Time to Heal is a happy example of the art that therapy can and should be when superimposed on a theoretical substratum and practiced by skilled technicians. In this slender and readily readable volume on the treatment of childhood schizophrenia, the theoretical formulations and the practical implications of such theory are spelled out in a series of vignettes that, when added up, delineate the disordered life patterns of the schizophrenic child and the manner in which a devoted and disciplined staff attempts to alter such aberrant patterns. The authors use the term "corrective socialization" and it is this, in the most literal sense, that they appear to accomplish with a number of the children in treatment in the Ittleson Center for Child Research (where they have been engaged in research and treatment of schizophrenic children for more than fifteen years). Their emphasis is upon providing a milieu in which the entire staff is geared to the understanding of the individual child's pathology and to rectifying this by gentle but direct challenging of each child's persistent needs to perpetuate his self-defeating behavior.
The authors envision the schizophrenic child as being deficient in adaptive functioning; he lacks proper tools for perceiving, ordering, and manipulating reality; he fails miserably in predicting the impact of his behavior on others because of his limited self-awareness. They see the "educative correction of these fundamental lacks as the sine qua non of treatment" and point out that "the most important method of achieving correction lies in the process of human interaction"—hence, their term corrective socialization.
Having briefly established their theoretical framework, they proceed in the remainder of the book to illuminate how they tackle, in the structured setting of the institution, instances of a range of behavior specific to the psychopathology of the schizophrenic child