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This readable book is the story of two psychiatric social workers, themselves parents of three sons, who here described the method of reparenting they used to treat extremely sick schizophrenic patients whom they took into their own home. The patients included paranoid, catatonic, and hebephrenic, living together as a family and helping one another. It is a fascinating story, full of drama; one cannot help but admire the fortitude and devotion displayed here. Nor is there any question about the severity of the illness of those accepted. Terrific outbursts of anger requiring countless people to restrain one patient, and the vast overwhelming fear experienced by another are graphically shown. Also included are patients' thoughts.
The theoretical framework is that of transactional analysis, with the concept of parent, adult, and child ego states, the theory being that an individual incorporates the parent ego state in imitation of the parents, who ideally are moralizing and nurturing. The child ego state is emotional, powerful, and takes in parental messages as “script.” The adult ego state is problem-solving and data-processing. The process of reparenting involves completely erasing the parent ego state.
In the Schiff home when the “child” tells the “parents” he has something to work out, a group of people gather in a circle and the “child” is placed in the middle and told to do whatever he needs to do. He is allowed to get completely into his psychosis, checked only if he represents a real threat to himself or other people. When he is exhausted from his acting out and is in his child state, the “scripting” takes place by having his misperceptions corrected by his new parents. The theory is that infantile anger which comes from the feelings of the preverbal child have to be exposed, and then relinquished. The authors state: