ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the effect on the family of depressive illness in one or both parents and briefly refers to the characteristics of certain forms of psychiatric illness. Psychoneurotic disorder in the father or mother provides a complication for the growing child, but psychosis in a parent presents the child with more subtle threats to healthy development. A very severe psychotic breakdown is rather like a physical illness in the sense that it is easily recognized as an illness, and the medical profession knows how to take responsibility when confronted with such obvious disorder. The antisocial tendency represented a compulsion in the child to make external reality mend the original trauma, which of course quickly became forgotten and therefore became unmendable by simple reversal. When the aggression and the destructiveness that are part of human nature, and the ambivalence, as it is sometimes called, in human relationships – when these things have been reached in personal development.
