Genealogy of the Weakest Child

Daughter: Mom, can I go out?

Mother: Sure, go enjoy yourself.

Don't worry about me sitting here alone all night.

Mother has just created a classic double bind, saying yes and no to her daughter at the same time. Most parents use such paradoxical commands occasionally because they are unable to resolve their conflicting feelings. That familiar behavior may seem harmless. But according to a branch of psychiatry known as family therapy, repeated double binding is ordinarily found in families that produce schizophrenics.

Unlike most psychiatrists, who believe that schizophrenia arises from a genetic defect or a chemical imbalance, family therapists tend to believe that schizophrenia is not a disease but a desperate strategy adopted by a family in trouble. According to this view, the family's complex web of emotional transactions is like a cybernetic, or automatically controlled system. Sometimes, when internal pressures threaten to blow the family apart, one member--usually a son or daughter--either knowingly or unknowingly agrees to become mentally ill. In a number of complex ways, this tactic holds the family together. But the child pays a big price. Says Murray Bowen, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Georgetown University Medical Center: "The main building block of schizophrenia is the process through which parental immaturity is transmitted to children."

Mother's Role. Most family therapists try to get at the roots of schizophrenia by treating parents and grandparents as well as the child. But at a Manhattan conference of family therapists (titled "Beyond the Double Bind"), Bowen insisted that the roots go farther back. In fact, he believes that it probably takes close to ten generations of parental weakness to produce a schizophrenic.

In any family, according to Bowen, one child usually grows up to be stronger than the parents, most of the others remain about as immature as the mother and father, and one child does not function as well as anyone else in the family. Because most people select mates with levels of emotional maturity roughly equal to their own, he says, this "weakest child" will grow up to mate with a similarly impaired adult and start the cycle over again at a more disturbed level. Says Bowen: "If we follow the lineage of the weakest child of the weakest child of the weakest child through multiple generations, we eventually emerge with a child so weak it collapses into schizophrenia on emotional or physical separation from the parents."

Down through the generations.

Bowen believes, each set of parents unwittingly damages the weakest child. But the mother's role is more crucial: the weak child is usually the one with the most intense early attachment to the mother. Troubled mothers often try to control their own immaturity by using the double bind in caring for the child. Example: "Stay an infant, so I can care for you. Grow up, be a success." In an early study of schizophrenia, Bowen cited the example of a mother's way of dealing with a psychotic son: she buttered his bread, cut his meat and poured his milk, all the while urging the son to learn to do more for himself.

By the last generation, the weak child can no longer function and may be beyond cure. Says Bowen: "There's an awful lot of schizophrenia that is the end product of these multiple generations. The best we're going to do in those cases is to relieve the symptoms." He sees little hope "if the goal is to take the person and make him as normal as an ancestor was five or six generations ago. I don't think nature will put up with that."

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