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This volume is a collection of papers, originally published twenty years ago and now revised, with the deletion of some chapters and the addition of some new ones. I will confine my remarks to this revised edition.
The work began in 1950 at the Yale Psychiatric Institute as a study of the families of seventeen hospitalized schizophrenics. The applied research model included only families that could remain in the study for a sufficient length of time for them to be studied in a thorough, multifaceted manner. It required at least the mother and one sibling to be available. The research instruments included independent psychological testing of the patients and of their family members where possible, independent interviewing by researchers from the disciplines of social work and psychiatry, and observations made in the course of their ongoing therapy. The results led to a series of papers that form the body of the work being reviewed.
The chapters cover such subjects as the role of the family in schizophrenic disorders, characteristics of the mothers and fathers of schizophrenic patients, the effects of marital difficulties, the transmission of thinking disorders, incestuous and homosexual problems, observations on identical and fraternal twins, psychotherapy with schizophrenic patients, and a theory of the origin of