COP 2//Freud's Theories

www.lowdensitylifestyle.com

Sigmund Freud had theories and thoughts on the development of schizophrenia. 

Freud thought he understood the nature of schizophrenia. It is not a brain disorder, but a disturbance in the unconscious caused by unresolved feelings of homosexuality. However, he maintained that psychoanalysis would not work with schizophrenics because such patients ignore their therapist's insights and are resistant to treatment (Dolnick 1998: 40). Later psychoanalysts would claim, with equal certainty and equal lack of scientific evidence, that schizophrenia is caused by smothering mothering. In 1948, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, for example, gave birth to the term "schizophrenogenic mother," the mother whose bad mothering causes her child to become schizophrenic (ibid. 94). Other analysts before her had supported the notion with anecdotes and intuitions, and over the next twenty years many more would follow her misguided lead.

http://skepdic.com/psychoan.html

The psychodynamic view of schizophrenia

The psychodynamic approach views schizophrenia as the result of the disintegration of the ego. It 

is the ego’s job to keep control of the id’s impulses and strike a compromise between the demands 

of the id and the moral restrictions of the superego. According to the Freudians, some types of 

abnormal upbringing (particularly if there is a cold, rejecting ‘schizogenic’ mother) can result in a 

weak and fragile ego, whose ability to contain the id’s desires is limited. This can lead to the ego 

being ‘broken apart’ by its attempt to contain the id, leaving the id in overall control of the psyche. 

If this happens, the person loses contact with reality as they can no longer distinguish between 

themselves and others, their desires and fantasies and reality (you need an ego to be able to do 

this). They regress to a state of ‘primary narcissism’ little different from that of a newborn infant, 

dominated by their animal instincts, incapable of organizing their own behaviour and hallucinating as 

a result of their basic inability to distinguish between their imaginations and reality. 

The psychodynamic view is not highly regarded any more, for several reasons. The development of 

effective antipsychotic drugs in the 1950s and 1960s gave the biological view of schizophrenia a 

boost from which the psychological theories have never really recovered. As mainstream 

psychology turned away from Freud’s tripartite model of the psyche under the influence first of 

behaviourism and then of the cognitivists psychodynamic theories generally fell from favour. 

Research showed that the mother’s personality was not a reliable predictor of mental illness and the 

schizogenic mother approach came to be regarded as an embarrassing, sexist holdover from a less 

enlightened time (although much research continues to implicate a disturbed upbringing as a risk in 

schizophrenia onset and relapse). Finally, the apparent failure of psychodynamic therapies 

successfully to treat psychotic patients led to the abandonment of this approach by all by the most committed psychodynamicists.