After the Neo-Hebbian, Bidwellian, and poetic-subjectivist viewpoints already expressed, it seems appropriate to investigate the clinician’s outlook. The following much-excerpted reprint is from a new magazine called Voices; the author, Jay Haley, has kindly given me permission to publish this drastically foreshortened version of a part of his article “The Art of Being Schizophrenic.”
... To use the term “schizophrenic” loosely for anyone who wanders in the hospital door looking befuddled betrays those individuals who have worked long and hard to achieve the disease.
People who have attempted schizophrenia without the correct family background have universally failed. . . . They can erupt into psychotic-like behavior in combat, or when caught in some other mad and difficult situation, but they are unable to sustain that behavior when the environment seems to right itself. The same point applies to the variety of fascinating drugs which are falsely said to induce psychosis. Not only does the drug influence miss the essence of the experience, but the effect wears rapidly off. The occasional goat who manages to be a schizophrenic after the drug has left his system is easily separated from the sheep who go back to normal—he has come from the right sort of family and probably would have achieved schizophrenia even without the benefit of medical research.
The Family: ... as individuals, the family members are unrecognizable on the street, but bring them together and the outstanding feature is immediately apparent—a kind of formless, bizarre despair overlaid with a veneer of glossy hope and good intentions concealing a power-struggle-to-the-death coated with a quality of continual confusion.
The Mother: Just as the child in a circus family learns from his parents how to maneuver on the slack wire, so does the schizophrenic learn from his mother how to maneuver acrobatically in interpersonal relations. To achieve schizophrenia a man must have experienced a mother who has a range of behavior unequaled except by the most accomplished of actresses. She is capable, when stung (which occurs whenever any suggestion is made to her), of weeping, promising violence, expressing condescending concern, threatening to go mad and fall apart, being kind and pious, and offering to flee the country if another word is said.
The Father: . . . must teach him to remain immovable. The father of the schizophrenic has a stubbornness unequaled among men (as well as the skill to keep a woman in the state of exasperated despair which helps mother make use of her full range of behavior). On occasions when present and sober such a father can easily say, “I am right, God in heaven knows I cannot be proven wrong, black is not white and you know it too in your heart of hearts.”