ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two phases in the relationship between the future patient and his family and the connections between these phases and the course of events leading to hospitalization. The first phase consists of the evolution of the family's accommodation to behavioral deviance on the part of the future patient. This phrasing emphasizes one side of a complicated reciprocity between family relations and the deviance of family members. The second phase consists of the disruption of this accommodation. The chapter suggests common patterns of relationship between future mental hospital patients and their immediate interpersonal communities, as well as the conditions under which these patterns deteriorate and collapse. The career of the mental patient and his family ordinarily comes to the attention of treatment personnel during the course of an unmanageable emergency and again fades from view when that emergency is in some way resolved.
