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Gerard and Siegel had personal interviews with childhood relatives emotionally important in the rearing of seventy-one male schizophrenics. Information gained was then used to complete a questionnaire. A roughly comparable control group of thirty male high school students was similarly studied.
The authors' results indicate that the male schizophrenic has been exposed to a particular childhood environment. The family unit was not adequate to insure the development of a reasonable degree of maturity. The parents failed to establish an adult marital relationship. The mother especially tended to project her own insecurity onto the affected child. He was uniformly exposed to markedly overprotective attitudes based perhaps on the mother's feelings that the world was dangerous and threatening. These attitudes fostered the development of withdrawal tendencies and increased dependency. A domineering mother and a weak father led to confusion over sexual identification. Grandiosity was furthered through favoring; inferiority, through comparison and competition with other children.
The family background may or may not be the X factor which is necessary to develop the phenotype of the disease in those genetically predisposed.