Psychotherapy of the family as a measure for preventing relapses and improving the prognosis in schizophrenic patients.

The increasing interest in the relationship among psychoanalysis, linguistics and higher nervous activity (neurodynamic) is recalled. As most of the works on the therapy of the family have been based upon psychodynamic interpretations, the authors shall try to speculate on how much room this field should be given in the phenomena related to higher nervous activity. The study of Pavlov, Gantt and others on biological and social factors influencing human behaviour have been discussed in relation to the system represented by the family nucleus. Some aspects have been taken in consideration like the double bind, the perverse triangle and the formation of a scapegoat. Double bind theory and praxis is representing a paradoxical situation similar to unavoidable conditioned patterns. The behaviour of the "designed patient" may be interpreted as a tentative escape to express his disagreement to the fixed situation. What happens is a kind of abnormal conditioning which is realized through a progressive stratification of discordant learning. The final result is the disorganisation of cognitive processes. In the meantime, we observe a discordance of the activity of the first and the second signaling system because, very often, an apparent external calm is accompanied by intense cardiovascular or visceral turmoil. Every kind of communication should take care of both processes, the congnitive and the neurodynamic. The analysis of the verbal, as well as the non-verbal communication in the family setting, may be fruitfully based upon the study of the progressive significance of the cognitive-emotional dissyntony, as well as the dissyntony between the 1st and the 2nd S.S., and the transactional dissyntony implicit in the double bind. A group of 25 families of schizophrenics followed by one up to five years has been examined following the concepts above mentioned.