ABSTRACT
Family therapy with families who have a member with serious mental illness (i.e., those diagnosed with schizophrenia, manic-depressive, or schizoaffective disorders) has a long but not necessarily glorious history. The beginnings of family therapy in the United States, in fact, involved families with schizophrenic members, most of whom were interviewed in the context of the ill member’s hospitalization. Based on earlier psychodynamic ideas such as the “schizophrenogenic mother” (Fromm-Reichmann, 1948), many of these family therapy pioneers speculated that family communication and affiliation dynamics were responsible for causing schizophrenic symptoms (Bateson et al., 1956; Lidz and Fleck, 1960; Wynne and Singer, 1963). These theories were tested in research studies during the 1960s and found wanting; those studies concluded that the theories of family etiology of mental illness failed to produce any variables that could be clearly linked to the development of schizophrenia (Meissner, 1970; Mi shier and Waxier, 1965). However, long before they had been adequately tested, therapeutic interventions based on these theories were already taking place, often to the detriment of families of the mentally ill, who felt blamed by family therapists for causing their family member’s illness (Hatfield and Lefley, 1987).
