Word: schizophrenia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Unlike most psychiatrists, who believe that schizophrenia arises from a genetic defect or a chemical imbalance, family therapists tend to believe that schizophrenia is not a disease but a desperate strategy adopted by a family in trouble. According to this view, the family's complex web of emotional transactions is like a cybernetic, or automatically controlled system. Sometimes, when internal pressures threaten to blow the family apart, one member-usually a son or daughter-either knowingly or unknowingly agrees to become mentally ill. In a number of complex ways, this tactic holds the family together. But the child pays...
Mother's Role. Most family therapists try to get at the roots of schizophrenia by treating parents and grandparents as well as the child. But at a Manhattan conference of family therapists (titled "Beyond the Double Bind"), Bowen insisted that the roots go farther back. In fact, he believes that it probably takes close to ten generations of parental weakness to produce a schizophrenic...
...with a similarly impaired adult and start the cycle over again at a more disturbed level. Says Bowen: "If we follow the lineage of the weakest child of the weakest child of the weakest child through multiple generations, we eventually emerge with a child so weak it collapses into schizophrenia on emotional or physical separation from the parents...
...Japanese aggression nor worldwide Depression could seriously daunt. Since the late '20s its population had grown by a third, to well over 3 million, its real estate values had trebled, and skyscrapers had pierced its once low skyline. At the same time-such was the city's schizophrenia-Shanghai contained vast pockets of poverty. On an average winter morning, it is said, scores of people might be found dead on its streets, victims of hunger or tuberculosis...
Jaynes thinks the bicameral mind is a reality, and could be reawakened in special cases if anyone cared to. Says he: "If you took a young child with a family history of schizophrenia (in other words, the right chemical trigger) and if that child also had an imaginary playmate-a vestige of the old voices-you could train that child to bicamerality." The problem, he says, is that the child could not function in the modern world any more than a schizophrenic can. For mankind as a whole, "the voices are dead. We are stuck in a conscious world...