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The view that individual neurosis is an expression of family neurosis has gained more or less general acceptance in recent years, but the systematic exploration of the psychodynamic processes linking the two forms has scarcely started. The broad contours of this new field of inquiry are suggested by Dr. Ehrenwald's impressive study of the types of interpersonal attitudes which facilitate the spread of mental illness. A pioneer in the formulation of family psychodynamics, he also presents useful theoretical constructs on those modes of relatedness which tend to defend the family and community against such psychologic contagion.
The major portion of the book presents hitherto unpublished material. Parts of five chapters have appeared in professional journals. One chapter brings up to date an absorbing psychoanalytic history based on more than fifteen years of clinical contact with thirteen obsessive-compulsive personalities spanning four generations of the so-called Obscomp family. This and other illustrative material derived from the author's own clinical experience is supplemented by two delightful chapters on Mozart and Picasso, focused on patterns of “sharing and compliance” and “contagion and rebellion” in their respective relationships with their fathers. These “father and son” studies lead the author to the conclusion that “genius, like intellectual eminence, mediocrity, and neurosis, tends to conform to identical patterns of sharing, contagion, complementarity or rebellion—as the case may be.”
Dr. Ehrenwald's findings suggest, rather than cause-and-effect relationships, the “continued contagious potential of interpersonal dynamics, of certain environmental influences, impinging upon both the adult and the child.” A distinction between the primary environmental influences of the early postnatal period and the secondary environmental influences associated with an individual's later conditioning is, in his view, “largely artificial.” He continues, “One is the linea