Congruence of personality assessments within families with a schizophrenic son

Following the phenomenological approach to interaction in psychiatrically disturbed families a personality questionnaire ('Giessen Test') was used to assess the views three family members (father, mother, son) had of themselves and of each other. These views may be regarded as quite stable results of interaction processes, so that conclusions about family interaction patterns may be drawn from the level of concordance of any two of them. Comparisons were made between families in which a son had been hospitalized for the first time with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and those in which a son had been hospitalized for surgical treatment, n = 30 in each category. The psychiatric patients did not on the whole give distorted personality descriptions. But in the index families the relationship between father and son was found characteristically different from that in the control families. This fact is interpreted as a reaction of the father to the deviant behaviour of the son, who did not conform with the male sex-role expectations of the father. The father as it is could not then identify with his son as a father usually does and perhaps necessarily should. The answers of the mothers partly confirm this conclusion. With regard to the parental dyad, the findings suggest that the fathers' needs for reciprocal consideration are not met by their wives.