Commentary: schizophrenic patients

The results of the Boston Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia Study were reported with a mixture of hopes and fears (Gunderson et al. 1984; Stanton et al. 1984). The hope was that those therapists, hospitals, and training programs that promoted and promulgated the idea that an exploratory, insight-oriented (EIO) psychotherapy was an important, usual, and practical way of treating schizophrenia would step back from this claim and see this approach in a more restricted and selective perspective. The fear was that the results would be reduced to a broader indictment of this modality such that its proper role with schizophrenic patients would be buried. Behind both this wish and this fear were the types of vivid personal experience in working with schizophrenic patients that the papers by Sandin and by Levander and Cullberg illustrate.