Thought Disorder and Family Relations of Schizophrenics

A. Introduction We HAVE FOUND that certain parental forms of focusing attention, communicating, and interpersonal "relating" are intimately linked to the forms of ego impairment found in offspring.1-4In companion papers, we have indicated that our general research strategy in studying families of young adult schizophrenic persons has been to focus upon formal, stylistic, transactional patterns of families which might relate to the development of thought-communication disorders in individual offspring. We have conceptualized these disorders along a continuum of amorphousness to fragmentation.5 In this paper we shall describe the methodology whereby we have applied these principles to the study of families through projective techniques: (1) predicting the form of thinking and degree of disorganization of each patientoffspring from the tests ofothermembers of his family; (2) matching blindly patients and their families. We shall describe a viewpoint about projective tests which