Re-searching the schizophrenogenic mother.

Numerous studies of schizophrenics have defined a dominant, overprotective but basically rejecting mother as the schizophrenogenic mother of the literature. While such a maternal style has been incriminated as a causal influence on the development of schizophrenia and/or a response to schizophrenia or prodromal schizophrenic disturbance in a child, case-control studies raise doubt as to whether such a maternal style is over-represented at all in the families of schizophrenics. The present paper reviews the evolution of the concept and its critical evaluation, principally by American workers, and then attempts to integrate that research with British studies of expressed emotion. The British studies have looked principally a the course, rather than at the onset, of schizophrenic disturbance and demonstrated that exposure to high levels of expressed emotion in a key relative is predictive of schizophrenic relapse. The review suggests that the key components of expressed emotion--critical comments and overinvolvement--parallel the rejecting and overprotective characteristics imputed to the schizophrenogenic mother of the literature. While expressed emotion has been shown to predict relapse, causality has not, as yet, been demonstrated and several noncausal links are explored. As such research has the potential to promote key advances in the clinical management of schizophrenic patients, the review attempts to draw attention to the way in which findings from the regions complement each other.