Interpretation of Schizo 2nd

by Silvano Arieti

Book Overview

In this award-winning book, Interpretation of Schizophrenia, Silvano Arieti presents the history of the medical research on schizophrenia, the summary of the ideas of the major scholars who devoted... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465034292
• ISBN13: 9780465034291
• Release Date: August 1974
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 756 Pages
• Weight: 2.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A forgotten Copernicus

A forgotten Copernicus To understand Silvano Arieti's Interpretation of Schizophrenia we must first get straight the facts about psychiatry. Although this review is not the place to do it, those who are familiar with how some psychiatrists and neurologists dismiss bio-psychiatry know what I am talking about. Suffice it to say that there exists a whole journal, Ethical Human Psychology and Psychiatry that debunks biological psychiatry: a profession that has hoodwinked the whole society. Those who give credibility to everything that, under the banner of science, the status quo sells us (e.g., biological psychiatry), will consider it foolish that I take seriously an author who published a work about schizophrenia in 1955. Long before Colin Ross published Schizophrenia in this century, Arieti had already advanced a trauma model that would later resonate in Ross' psychiatric work. Virtually forgotten, Arieti's treatise is an authentic mine of theoretical and clinical information to understand psychosis. Most striking about the massive body of literature from Arieti's colleagues that pointed at the family as responsible for the schizophrenias in their patients is that the theory was never refuted. It was conveniently forgotten, swept under the rug of political correctness in the mental health professions. It is very common to read in the textbooks of contemporary psychiatry and psychology that the theory of the schizophrenogenic parents was discarded because it was erroneous with the most absolute absence of bibliographic references to support such claim. I cannot forget an article written in the present century in which an investigator complains that, despite an extensive search, he did not find any coherent and clear explanation of why the schizophrenogenic theory has been abandoned. As always, everything has to do with the fact that to question the parental deities is terrifying for most people, especially for those who are forbidden from using their own emotions: academics, including the mental health professionals. Arieti distinguishes between a "paleologic" form of thinking (what Julian Jaynes called "bicameral mind") and the thinking that comes from "Aristotelian logic" that rules Western man. Since the first edition of his book Arieti points out that the paleologic thinking, which modern man only experiences in dreams, was omnipresent in prehistoric cultures. In order to avoid a runaway anxiety that drives the victim into panic, the patient diagnosed as schizophrenic abandons the Aristotelian norms of intuitive logic and lapses into the sort of thinking of our most primitive ancestors. Like John Modrow, Arieti acknowledges the value of the work of Harry Sullivan about the panic the child experiences as a result of an all-out emotional assault from both parents. The paleologic regression can be adapted years after the abuse occurred, even when the child has become economically independent (cf. Modrow's How to Become a Schizophrenic). Th