ABSTRACT
Early theorists had posited several family interactional factors that appeared to them to be associated uniquely and ubiquitously with schizophrenia. The underlying assumption was that family interaction, especially in the marital pair, was disordered and that family integrity was maintained by the expression of schizophrenic symptoms in one member. This version of a systems theory of schizophrenia explicitly placed the origin of the patient's disorder in the family and its processes over time—sometimes even across generations. This had its clearest exposition in Haley and Madanes' writings (Madanes, 1983). The present chapter reviews the current literature within what we hope is a more comprehensive version of systems theory. We propose that a systems perspective demands the inclusion of variables from all relevant levels of a system before a conclusion is reached about causality.
