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A schizophrenic is always one who is reared by a woman who suffers from a perversion of the maternal instinct.
John N. Rosen
THE DEVELOPMENT of the schizophrenogenic mother concept within American psychiatry has been something of an enigma. This interpersonal hypothesis of the etiology of schizophrenia involved a sharp break in the historical progression of understanding the disease. Though former promulgators have gone from calling the schizophrenogenic mother a "half truth" to a psychiatric "myth," this psychiatric concept remains a puzzle, still (Arieti 1977, p. 353; Neill 1990). The circumstances surrounding the development, flowering, and decline of the schizophrenogenic mother concept have not been fully explored.
This study tracks the history of the concept within psychiatry, and in relation to social changes occurring in American society from 1927 to 1977. Bleuler (1919/ 1970, p. 111 ) observed that conceptual errors in medicine were not arbitrary but developed "with precision toward certain definite goals, which may be good or bad, clear or obscure." It is this researcher's view that the schizophrenogenic mother concept was developed in the context of psychiatric concerns, particularly the goal of establishing psychotherapy as an acceptable primary treatment for schizophrenia. The tension over women's changing position vis-O-vis American men created a strain in the relation between the sexes in the larger culture during the historical period in which one segment of the psychiatric community espoused the schizophrenogenic mother concept.
An analysis of the schizophrenogenic mother concept can provide insight into the dynamic relationship between the sexes in society and how it can be mirrored in science.
An important point must be made clear at the outset: not all sociologically oriented researchers investigating schizophrenia accepted the idea of a schizophrenogenic mother as a primary causal agent. Some, particularly those in England, made headway in the treatment of schizophrenia by focusing on factors involved in relapse (as G. W. Brown and his colleagues). Others explored the social factors of anomalous family speech patterns (as M. Singer came to in the 1960s), features of the interpersonal relationships in families with a schizophrenic member, possible differences in parental interaction with schizophrenic and well children (Mishler and Waxler 1968; Waxler and Mishler 1971), and how family interaction affects individual thinking in cases of...