The relational roots of schizophrenia

Abstract

From 1979 trough 1986, our Center systematically issued one and the same series of prescriptions to the parents of every family (49 in all) that undertook family therapy with us for the problem of a child diagnosed as schizophrenic according to DSMI11R. The procedure was instrumental to both therapy and research. The response to it yield a repetitive pattern of phenomena hitherto unobserved, strongly indicative of complex trans generational strategies we called "imbroglio" and " instagation". We sistematically traced the phenomena we observed back to what we consider their single natural root, namely a disturbed marital relationship of the parental couple. We were able to reconstruct, in fact, how parents of this type, in attempting to mask their flawed relationship while providing it with a safety-valve, elaborate a special game. This type of complementary game, which no partner can ever win or lose, we called the couple stalemate. The symptom thus appears to be the emerging quality of a lenghty interactional family process that gets under way in a particular son or daughter who first gets enticed into joining the parents game and then becomes wholly involved in it. When the symptom erupts, it does so as a result of a sequence of behaviors and events that utterly invalidates the foundations upon which the "patient" has built up his/her stunded affective and cognitive universe.