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A writer with two or more skills or strong interests often brings them together to find that they have thrown light upon, even fructified, each other. If they have done so for him, they may for others; hence Hamlet's Enemy. Theodore Lidz's mind ranges widely, as befits a famous practitioner and Yale Professor of Psychiatry, and he has at least two special interests beside his profession: he has studied Hamlet and the literature about it for 25 years; he has also studied mythology and with others has written a paper on Cargo Cultism in Melanesian Society. He is a psychoanalyst with a special interest in schizophrenias. The theme common to these apparently diverse passions is of course the family; 'The Family: The Source of Human Resources' is the title of one of his essays: in 1963 he published a 3-essay book called 'The Family and Human Adaptation'.
On 19 September 1975, in the Times Literary Supplement, Dr J. K. Wing reviewed Lidz's last book, The Origin and Treatment of Schizophrenic Disorders. The review evoked a longish letter by Lidz (21 November) and that a shorter reply from Wing (5 December). From stalls or pit it was clear that each maintained that the other was excluding an important middle. Dr Wing claimed that Dr Lidz wrote as if no child brought up in a family belonging to one or two types could fail to be schizophrenic and as if no schizophrenia could occur except in such a family; Dr Lidz in effect replied that Wing wrote as if the particular family structure (personalities and their interaction) played no part at all in