ABSTRACT
T. Lidz developed his theory of family imbalance on the basis of the research he and his co-workers carried out on seventeen atypical families of people with Schizophrenia. J. L. Singer and L. C. Wynne compared the generated speech from comments on the Rorschach test from parents of children with Schizophrenia, neurotic and normal children. The variance was only found in the speech of the fathers, with the highest scores for fathers of people with Schizophrenia the lowest for fathers of normal children and the fathers of neurotic children in between. The general philosophy of rejecting the individual sufferer/deviant as the key to the problem in favour of the family system as a whole has an enormous attraction in a wide range of arenas beyond the treatment of Schizophrenia. Family therapy’s influence waxed as the influence of traditional individual casework waned in much the same way as individual psychodynamic explanations of the origins of Schizophrenia were replaced by family models.
