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This eminently sensible book is short in length and its simplicity of style belies the profundity and complexity of the author's thoughts. The following quotation highlights the importance of the topic: 'The study of schizophrenia has an importance to the science of man that even transcends the relief of the myriad of suffering patients. There are indications that a satisfactory understanding of schizophrenia will be synchronous and synonymous with the opening of vast new insights concerning the integration of man and his emotional homeostasis' (pp. x-xi).
The author is a genuine academician in the best sense of the word. He expresses himself concisely and clearly without pretention, and because he has so thoroughly mastered the writing skills taught by such professionals as Rudolph Flesch, William Strunk, and E. B. White, his conclusions are deceptively self-evident. For example, my first impression about his formulations of the family interactions of schizophrenics was that I already knew them. What I had forgotten was that I knew them because Lidz had taught them to all of us in his earlier writings. In this pithy volume he pulls together years of research, clinical experience, and mature reflection.
While many have emphasized the importance of family dynamics, Lidz is one of the few who have succeeded in demonstrating the relevance of the study of the family to clinical psychoanalysis. Many psychoanalysts feel uncomfortable when dealing with the larger unit of the family because the focus has been on communication; underlying intrapsychic processes and developmental defects seem to be underplayed if not actually ignored. By contrast, the author describes types of object relationships among parents which have significant bearing upon the child's personality integration. The latter