You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The authors describe relationships among a group of young hospitalized schizophrenic women and their mothers who visited the patients periodically. Very little preliminary history was taken from either patients or mothers, for the investigators were more concerned with changes in the present relationships of mothers and daughters than with their influence upon each other in the past. Group
therapy prepared mothers and daughters for subsequent individual therapy.
It would be tangential to review this book as a contribution to the phenomenology of schizophrenia or the techniques and problems of group therapy. The creation of new methods of research is in itself scientifically important. Truly great knowledge is frequently derived from courageous, imaginative methods of observation. Unfortunately Abrahams and Varon have felt compelled to arrive at specific conclusions, perhaps because of the common notion that conclusions are primary in research and that methods of study are ancillary. The validity of these conclusions may be challenged by many readers. For instance, the observation that 'the mothers were apparently all deeply obsessive characters' may be questioned. 'In the group each related to her daughter to a great extent as an alter ego who, when she conformed to mother's extremely rigid unrealistic and idealized image of herself, was given tenderness and understanding.' This observation is not a defensible generalization. Previous investigators have studied intensively the mothers of schizophrenic daughters; these mothers certainly are not all deeply obsessive characters.
But to debate such issues is less important than to realize that if we are ever to achieve an understanding of causes of schizophrenia we must evolve new methods of observing transactions and communications between persons. These authors travel a rational road. They may have missed some signs along the highway, and the method of study they employ is of a sort that demands the resolu