I have begun a project to try to say who my professional self is. The first part of that will be to try to describe the precursors of my current professional self, as best as I can.
It is already clear that the precursor section will include at least three parts:
1. The chronology of my coming to family therapy before discovering Bowen and eventually beginning the postgraduate training program.
2. The research work that I did at UCLA and at the University of Rochester where I scored the odd kind of communication Singer and Wynne had discovered in many parents of schizophrenics at NIMH.
3. Reacquainting myself with the post-WWII to early 1960s milieu of clinicians and researchers who began focusing on “environmental factors” influencing the development of schizophrenia.
This movement spawned both family therapy and the quantitative study of family factors in schizophrenia. And we all know somebody who was right in the middle of all that.
In the last two weeks, I clearly realized something I had been vaguely aware of for years: anything known to influence the development of schizophrenia also influences the development of no-self generally, not just schizophrenia.
For this short piece, I’ll present a little of #2.
I began graduate school at UCLA in summer 1968. Earlier that spring, while still teaching at a Montessori school, I stumbled on the little Warren Brodey book, Changing Families. I was stunned at how congruent it was with my observations of the parent-child interactions of the kids who were having trouble adapting in our school. Quickly, I found Intensive Family Therapy by Boszormenyi-Nagy and Framo. I swallowed it whole and got my first tastes of Bowen and other family therapists of that time.
I kept reading what family therapy I could find as I began grad school. Second year, I took a course from Eliot Rodnick , a renowned schizophrenia researcher and codirector with Michael Goldstein of the UCLA Family Project. In the course I was introduced to the work of Margaret Singer and Lyman Wynne at NIMH. Margaret in her Rorschach and TAT testing of families of schizophrenics had observed that the parents of the schizophrenics communicated in various odd ways that made it difficult for a listener to share focus of attention and meaning. Some of these language oddities are blatant and some are more subtle. In any case, the person seems oblivious to what a listener needs to know in order to follow their speech. Then one might infer that this communication which makes it hard to share a focus of attention would make an environment for a child to grow up in that might make it difficult for that person to develop stable perceptions of the world and stable habits of attention.
Margaret developed a formal system for scoring these language oddities. Singer and Wynne showed that the presence of this kind of language in a parent could significantly distinguish the parents of schizophrenics from parents of nonschizophrenics they had tested.
I then joined the UCLA Family Project as a grad student researcher and bottle washer. The Project had no particular theory driving its research. Their aim was to identify general family factors which might influence the development of schizophrenia in a high risk population. In this study, that was outpatient adolescents brought by their parents to the UCLA Psychology Clinic for help with their child.
Lucky for me, they used a shotgun variety of research procedures with these families. Individual tests, symptom counting, a couple of very interesting face-to-face interaction tasks for each family.
I suspected that finding the Singer-Wynne kind of odd communication in the parents of the UCLA outpatient adolescents could identify adolescents who would be at greater risk for later severe psychiatric problems, including schizophrenia.
To that end, Margaret Singer allowed me to use her beginnings of a communication deviance(CD) scoring manual for speech in the transcripts of the parents’ Thematic Apperception Test(TAT). I expanded the scoring manual and applied it to both the UCLA parents’ TATs and also to transcripts of TATs from NIMH parents of schizophrenics and non schizophrenics which Singer and Wynne were kind enough to loan to me.
First, I analyzed the NIMH transcripts and found that I could develop scoring rules that significantly distinguished many parents of the NIMH schizophrenics from the parents of the nonschizophrenics. That gave me some confidence that my scoring was on the right track.
Then I applied the NIMH scoring rules to the UCLA parents. This resulted in being able to identify three groups of parents, one whose adolescent might be regarded as high risk, based on their parents’ communication scored on the TAT speech. And an intermediate risk group and a low risk group.
Eventually, the Family Project showed with the 5, 10, and 15 year followups that the adults who had come from the group identified as high risk already had more schizophrenia spectrum disorders and those from the low risk group had either no mental illness or had other psychiatric problems not from the schizophrenia spectrum(Goldstein, 1987).
After graduate school, I joined the University of Rochester Child and Family Study(URCAFS). This project was a large longitudinal study of families with a boy under 10 years old and a mother who had a history of hospitalization for either schizophrenia or severe affective disorder. The families with a schizophrenic mother are apriori known to be at higher risk for their child later developing schizophrenia. These families were studied with a large number of physiological, individual, and family interaction methods.
My small team of students and I developed scoring for communication deviance in individual interviews and family interaction tasks. We also used the previous Singer and Wynne scoring for Rorschach and TAT.
Subsequent followups showed that the boys whose parents had CD in the individual Rorschach and in the Consensus Rorschach were already beginning to show more social and achievement problems in school. …
References
Doane, J. (1981). Parental Communication Deviance and Affective Style: Predictors of subsequent schizophrenia-spectrum disorders in vulnerable adolescents. Arch Gen Psychiatry Archives of General Psychiatry, 38, 679-685.
Doane, J., Jones, J., Fisher, L., Ritzler, B., Singer, M., & Wynne, L. (1982). Parental Communication Deviance as a Predictor of Competence in Children at Risk for Adult Psychiatric Disorder. Family Process, 21(2), 211-223.
Goldstein, M. (1987). The UCLA High-risk Project. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 13(3), 505-514.
Herman, B., & Jones, J. (1976). Lack of Acknowledgment in the Family Rorschachs of Families With a Child at Risk for Schizophrenia. Family Process, 15(3), 289-302.
Jones, J. (1977). Patterns of Transactional Style Deviance in the TAT’s of Parents of Schizophrenics. Family Process, 16, 327-337.
Jones, J., Rodnick, E., Goldstein, M., McPherson, S., & West, K. (1977). Parental Transactional Style Deviance as a Possible Indicator of Risk for Schizophrenia. Arch Gen Psychiatry Archives of General Psychiatry, 34(1), 71-74.
Jones, J.E., Wynne, L., Al-Khayyal, M., Doane, J., Ritzler, B., Singer, M., & Fisher, L. Predicting current school competence of high-risk children with composite cross-situational measures of parental communication. In: Watt, N., Anthony, E., Wynne, L., &Rolf, J., eds. Children at Risk for Schizophrenia: A Longitudinal Perspective. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, (1984). 393-398.
Lewis, J., Rodnick, E., & Goldstein, M. (1981). Intrafamilial interactive behavior, parental communication deviance, and risk for schizophrenia. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 90(5), 448-457.
Lieber, D. (1977). Parental Focus of Attention in a Videotape Feedback Task as a Function of Hypothesized Risk for Offspring Schizophrenia. Family Process, 16(4), 467-475.
Sousa, P., Varese, F., Sellwood, W., & Bentall, R. (2013). Parental Communication and Psychosis: A Meta-analysis. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 756-768. doi:doi: 10.1093/schbul/sbt088
Wynne, L., Jones, J., & Al-Khayyal, M. Healthy family communication patterns: Observations in families “at risk” for psychopathology. In: Walsh, F., ed. Normal Family Processes. New York: Guilford Press, (1982), 142-164.
Wynne, L., Cole, R., & Perkins, P. (1987). University of Rochester Child and Family Study: Risk Research in Progress. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 13(3), 463-476.
Jim Edd,
Boy, those graduate school and early professional experiences certainly shape one’s professional direction. The predictions of the research you were involved with sound pretty interesting. Has that kind of prediction that seems it would have some clinical usefulness, just faded into the sunset with the dissolving focus on family in the clinical field at large ? On the other hand did the research discriminate the relationship of the parents to their schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic siblings? I’m wondering what you have in mind with your idea that what creates schizophrenia creates other varieties of no-self – is there something you are trying to define there about the family projection process? The family projection process seems to be the area the early family movement was most interested in and its still so important but since the definition of mental illness as a brain disorder the resistance to this idea has reasserted itself with a lot of force in my colleagues in clinical psychology and certainly in psychiatry. Thanks for the memories!
Mostly faded into the sunset. Two places I know who still use the CD idea are Richard Bentall’s group in England(see the Sousa 2013 reference) and Pekka Tienari’s group in Finland( used in their big adoption studies).
Sibling question. No, parental CD by itself doesn’t tell you which kid will be focused on. CD is a general style that the person uses with most everybody. You can see it in public, in politics, in business. Being on the receiving end of it anywhere becomes a real challenge to maintain self.
I see CD as one enabler of the family projection process, but not the only one.
The personal and political forces up against the family are strong and very real. That’s one reason that research funds for this kind of family research has dried up since 1977. And be careful who you talk to about it or NAMI could shortly be on your doorstep.
Jim Edd,
I am fascinated to learn about your early years in the family field and the opportunities you had to do research and collaboration at a time when the field was wide open for ideas. This is the first time I’ve heard the term, communication deviance. Would CD in a family lead to another CD: cognitive dissonance?
I imagine the early years as a time of excitement and confusion as researchers were searching for clues and concepts to explain what Bowen described as the flood of new data. What gave him an advantage, I believe, was his study of science, biology, and evolution, and his sense that the family was like other systems in nature.
I look forward to the next chapter in your development of a professional self, and how you first encountered Bowen.
I don’t know about the link to cognitive dissonance. What connection would you see?
I still do not understand how Bowen pulled it off. Science, evolution, etc. were an advantage, but others have absorbed those things but not made the leap he did. Margaret Singer was another one who would tell people plainly how she was thinking and how she got the amazing results she did. Then the vast majority would proceed as if they hadn’t heard a thing she said. Often the same for Bowen.
Jim Edd,
Thank you for submitting this very interesting history and your early study and work and writing that related to Bowen’s discoveries. I find it interesting how you were thinking things through for yourself and finding many resources for learning that would lead you to the postgraduate program with Bowen. Like others, I look forward to reading your next installment. I have enjoyed your thinking over the years, including your recent thinking about learning It makes sense that the richness of your ideas is based in part in your persistent learning and experience going back to these early works.
You’re welcome, Laurie. Persistent learner, some have said addicted learner. So many interesting learning challenges, so little time.
Jim Edd,
One more thought before the October session ends. You have me wanting to know more about communication deviance. In future, maybe you would say more about how to recognize it and what the experience of being on the “receiving end” is like.
My thought about cognitive dissonance first occurred just because of the same initials: CD. My understanding of cognitive dissonance is that it is the confusion one experiences when one’s own perceptions of a situation are met with a different perception from someone important in one’s life. What do you believe? your own experience or what you are being told? Children would be especially vulnerable.
I was wondering if communication deviance would leave the listener in a similar state of confusion and inner conflict.
Stephanie,
I don’t know much about cognitive dissonance, but your description of the child’s state of mind in that circumstance captures my understanding very well. Being on the receiving end of CD is very discombulating to people like me who have holes in their self they are not aware of. The person speaking with CD often appears completely average, speaking with an air of confidence and authority, yet you find yourself befuddled about what it is they are saying.
That was so much fun to read. I think the discovery of way to make sense of the world for self is really helped by being exposed to different types of research. Perhaps Bowen saw this CD and found an antidote in 1) getting the staff to talk abut the problems they were experiencing in managing self with the family members, in front of the families and 2) the ways in which one could move towards differentiation of self. That by becoming less sensitive and reactive and vulnerable as to how people speak to you or about you, the better off you will be. The more neutral idea that the family system acts without thought, based in evolution, is so clarifying and timely with even EO Wilson moving towards group selection. Catherin Rakow did an interview with Brodey too and he talked bout how a few of the parents of a blind child were like parents of schizophrenics, they treated the child as though the child could see. I think it will be extremely useful to write up your life long learning and I am looking forward to it.