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 Director of the Henry Ittelson Center for Child Research again demonstrates his creativeness as clinician, researcher, multidisciplinary team leader, and writer, in this account of twenty-six latency-age schizophrenic children, eighteen boys and eight girls, in residential treatment. Controls were a group of public school children matched for age and sex.
History, clinical observations, neurological studies, and a series of quantitative and qualitative tests of ego functions and adaptive capacities were used to assess the children. Rigorous attention was given to avoidance of bias and to independence of observations and evaluations. For example, the neurologist made his evaluations without knowledge of the neurological appraisals of the psychiatrists. The statistical data derived from over seventy tests were subjected to an independent statistical analysis by the late Irving Lorge who employed the Factors Approach. The families of the schizophrenic children (all intact families living in the neighborhood) and of the controls were studied and rated on a scale designed to yield a measure of family adequacy. Extended home visits, during which the experimenter was a participant observer with the family, made possible accurate appraisals of such variables as parental exercise of control over the child.
The findings support the hypothesis that childhood schizophrenia 'obviously is not a unitary, etiologically specific and positive disease entity relentlessly unfolding itself; it is merely a label indicating that the child deviates dramatically from normal in ego functioning, that he lacks normal guides for self-regulation, for achieving self-identity, and for differentiating himself from the world outside