ABSTRACT
It is now more than half a century since the anthropologist Gregory Bateson formed a team to study the communication patterns in families containing a schizophrenic member (Bateson et al. 1956). The group believed that in these families the ill person’s thought processes were in part shaped through the bizarre communication requirements imposed by other members. Bateson’s team also found that if the schizophrenic family member, hence called the ‘identified patient’ (i.p.), improved, the family would often decompensate. They speculated that the family ‘needed’ the i.p. to remain unwell, so that some kind of homeostatic state could be maintained. The team also observed that, when faced with therapeutic interventions, the family often resisted change. Over time Bateson and other workers developed the idea that the i.p. was really the family scapegoat, the victim of family dynamics and a collusive professional system. Logically, therapy aimed to ‘liberate’ the i.p. from this role and it resulted in practices that challenged the notion of the ‘sanity’ of the family (Cooper 1971).
