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Lidz presents a cogent summary of the clinical and theoretical results of his and his co-workers' continuing research on families of schizophrenics based on the (at least partially proved) hypothesis that the family provides major determinants of schizophrenic reactions. Lidz defines his psychoanalytic orientation toward the problems of schizophrenia and the social psychology of the family. While he does not reject the validity of neurophysiological and biochemical research on schizophrenia, he presents evidence that the theories emanating from these fields are far more speculative than those of his group and other workers who study the whole patient in his total performance. '… The critical characteristic of schizophrenia lies in the aberrant symbolic processes—in the distortion of perceptory meaning and logic … a condition in which the patient escapes from an intolerable world and his insoluble conflicts by altering his internal representation of reality… Unless one understands that man is endowed with two heritages, a genetic inheritance and a cultural heritage, one can never understand him or his physiological functioning correctly.'
Lidz presents abundant clinical evidence that the family provides the primary and decisive schooling in irrationality as well as abnormal stresses which preclude adequate ego integration, reality testing, and the formation of basically favorable attitudes toward self and others. This paper is a fine complement to Fromm-Reichmann's.