ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the family as a source of stress and reviews the conceptual and methodological issues that must be systematically dealt with. It offers some illustrative examples of directions of research that are concerned in part with problems of how stresses may originate with the family. A large body of research and theory has identified as stressful: common family forms, particular substructural aspects of common forms, situations of family forms in the process of transition and family structures that are either overtly broken in structure or are broken in a functional sense. The quality of interpersonal relations, as numerous investigators have demonstrated, may also constitute a source of stressors. In the mother-child relationship in the families of schizophrenics, they hypothesize, the child is presented with incongruent expectations, and these are of such a nature that no matter which one the child fulfills, he is subjected to punishment.
