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On the basis of extensive clinical studies and controlled empirical data, the authors maintain the view that skilled psychotherapy is superior to medicinal or combined therapy for psychotic schizophrenic patients. This book contains extensive descriptions of the authors' theoretical basis for their views and the nature of their psychotherapeutic procedure, with clinical examples supporting their contention that appropriate psychotherapy can effect “cure” of schizophrenic psychotic manifestations.
The authors preface their theory on the assumption that in the schizophrenic psychosis, similarly as in the neuroses, all symptom manifestations are etiologically rooted in a situational trauma that occurred during the preverbal life period of the individual. In the case of schizophrenia, however, there are very specific prerequisites for the development of psychotic symptomatology, namely, the individual's “proneness” to develop schizophrenia, and severe frustration of oral needs caused by the pathological mother's unconscious demands on the infant to gratify her own frustrated needs for self-fulfillment.
The authors describe at length the mother-child conflict and how the mother's failure to gratify the infant's oral needs caused it to develop existential anxiety. Resultant repressive forces compromised the child's ability to master subsequent developmental tasks — anal, genital, sexual — and confusion compounded the anxiety. Repeated parental demands, and the child's futile attempts to win gratification of biological and affective needs were met with punishment and rejection, and a sense of self-worthlessness was instilled.
The book describes the dynamic mechanisms that led to the development of the psychotic symptoms of defense in schizophrenia; that ideation and affect connected with the actual infantile conflicts were repressed, but when life stressors threatened their emergence to the conscious level the schizophrenic developed symptom defenses (in the manifest form of