ABSTRACT
Our recent work (Selvini Palazzoii, Cirillo, Selvini, & Sorrentino, 1988) focuses on the relational roots of serious mental disorders in adolescents. More recently we have singled out and characterized subgroups of the syndrome we customarily call “schizophrenia” and constructed precise models of the recurring interactive family processes leading to symptoms of the syndrome. However, before I present the specific subgroup of schizophrenic adolescents that I have chosen as my subject, I will return to “the roots,” that is, to the first presentation I made, in New York in 1985, describing our general model of the psychotic process in the family. On that occasion, I tried to synthesize theoretical concepts about psychosis we had gathered during our many years of qualitative clinical research. This research used a series of invariant prescriptions, which we assigned routinely at our center to all families that featured a child afflicted with a serious mental disorder.
