A Statistical Study of Family Relationships in Psychoneurosis

On the basis of family histories, a series of psychoneurotic patients in a university psychiatric clinic was compared to a group of their contemporaries not selected as to mental disease. Minor illnesses and family difficulties were disregarded throughout. The results indicated that 2 concepts (intrafamily conflict and mental disease in some member of the family group) are important concomitants of neurosis. The following conclusions were suggested by the data. Mental illness in parents, separation of parents or lack of adjustment between them, rejection by parent figures, parental overrestriction, mental illness in siblings or disturbed relationships between them, and disruption of the subject's marriage are indicated considerably more frequently in those students suffering from psychoneurosis than in the university population at large. Death, prolonged physical illness or foreign birth of parents, extra relatives living in the home, sibling favoritism, lack of siblings, and factors relating to size of sibship or relative ages of siblings are found no more often in the neurotics than in the others. The margin of difference between the two sets of items is great enough to suggest that the same conclusions may be true for psychoneurotic people in general.