Introduction

Abstract

The beginnings of family therapy in the decade following World War II interwove with new attempts to understand and possibly treat schizophrenia. Pioneering researchers and therapists, such as Gregory Bateson and the Palo Alto group, Ted Lidz, Lyman Wynne, Murray Bowen, and their teams, began to study the family of the schizophrenic patient. As a result, they came to challenge traditional medical as well as psychoanalytic notions concerning schizophrenia. Freud, for example, in assessing the treatment possibilities for such patients, had written in 1917: “... they give no evidence of transference and are therefore beyond the scope of our efforts, incurable from our point of view.” Within this new approach such assessment appeared rather a consequence of restricting observations and concepts that filtered out those powerful relational forces that operate within the schizophrenic’s family which subdued any individual member’s transference, as it were. In fact, probably no other psychiatric research and treatment endeavor has alerted us so much to how differing basic premises and differing observational tools entail differing therapeutic perspectives and strategies.