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My experience over the past thirty years has implanted the impression that each person has a highly specific threshold for the development of schizophrenia. The height of the threshold seems to be overdetermined. In each case, three mutually interacting factors appear to operate; these are heredity, constitution, and life experience. Understandably, the psychotherapist focuses on the factor which is readily accessible to psychological influence—the effects of life experience.
Most investigations seem to agree that the relationship with the mothering figure during the first few years of life plays a major role in schizophrenia, and that it signifies developmental arrest on—or regression to—the oral level. Studies of the relevant events have, by and large, stressed the traumatizing effects of an inadequate diet of emotional nourishment. Much less recognition has been given to that aspect of the young child's upbringing which seems to me to be even more crucial: namely, what he learns to do with aggressive impulses mobilized in his mental, what he learns to do with aggressive impulses mobilized in his mental apparatus through exposure to excessive frustration, excessive gratification, or both.
The child who tends to discharge frustration-aggression into his body, for example, is a likely candidate for psychosomatic illness later in life. The highway to depression is paved with frustration-aggression poured characteristically into the superego, which then attacks the ego. If the child does not discharge this impulsivity at all, but lets