FEST Writing Group

I will sketch here a paper I want to write.

In the 1950s through the 1980s, there was an abundance of family research, both quantitative and clinical, which followed efforts of the major pioneers of family therapy.  A great deal of this research dealt with families of schizophrenics.  This focus expanded to the family, after being more narrowly targeted on mothers of schizophrenics.

A lot of this I know first hand since I worked on two projects studying families of schizophrenics and families of individuals at risk for schizophrenia.

I have come to believe that it is time to revisit all this old family research, and look at it through the lens of Bowen family systems theory.  The family research was dismissed and buried with the advent of biological psychiatry in the late 1970s and the concomitant rise in genetics research on the study of schizophrenia.

Bowen’s view of schizophrenia expands in perspective to consider it to be one form of no-self in addition to the no-selfs of severe emotional illness, severe social disorders, and severe physical illness.  This thinking has led me to begin considering whether we should be studying more broadly what are the family system conditions which would be associated with the development of the extreme no-self in children who develop any of the severe disorders.  

For this paper, I will review the quantitative and clinical research on families of schizophrenics.  That is what I know best, but I will keep in mind that this is only one kind of no-self. The findings about families of schizophrenics might apply to some degree to families of the other forms of no self and vice versa.  I have observed this phenomenon in other forms of no-self like severe emotional problems, severe dissociative disorders, and severe chronic physical conditions.