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This study of an emotionally disturbed child and the psychosocial structure of its family examines the disturbed behavior of a child not as an isolated organism but as a biosocial one. Its social and psychic reactions are viewed as expressions of the social processes characteristic of its family. Hereditary factors may predetermine such components of personality as physical type, affectivity, motor reactivity, and intellectual potential, but the processes of socialization determine the form of all behavior. The stages of personality organization of the child are presented as advancing levels of biosocial integration with, and differentiation from, the environment, each stage merging into and overlapping the next. Loosely ordered on a temporal scale (from immediate postnatal to pubescent), six developmental stages are identified.
Thirty-six of the forty families studied were a fairly homogeneous urban Jewish lower middle-class group with children between the ages of two and seven years. Selected categories of family relations and behavior, such as marital relationship and parental behavior, were used to evaluate the comprehensive data obtained and an analysis of some typical patterns of marital relationship, types of family group, and the dominant psychosocial patterns characteristic of these families is presented.
Child rearing practices in these families reflect the parents' own unfulfilled needs and their failure to accept their parental roles. The child is conceived accidentally or for varying ulterior motives. In essence, there is no emotional room for the child as a child in these families and the child becomes a pawn in the conflict between the parents, a threat, and an external symbol of the parents' guilt. The inappropriate needs of the parents impart a regressive cast to the