HE family has long had a paradoxical position in the theory and prac-T tice of psychotherapy. Family relationships have long been recognized as significant in psychopathology, especially of children, and yet theoretical formulations have failed to integrate the intrapsychic and interpersonal aspects of behavior (16). The practice of psychiatry has always been ahead of theory in taking account of the network of relationships the patient is involved in, but again not in a systematic way. The child guidance movement has been in the vanguard in working toward a more inclusive approach, but even there a truly family-centered theory and practice are still to be achieved. Most striking has been the bias toward consideration of the mother-child relationship in etiological formulations, and toward treatment of mother and child to the exclusion of the father, as Pollak (10) has documen ted.One of the difficulties hampering the development of better integrated therapy is the inadequacy of our models for treating parents when the child is the raison d'ttre of treatment. In the 1930's there was considerable discussion of how mothers should be approached; whether maternal attitudes, the mother-child relationship, or the mother should be the focus of treatment. All the while the father was in limbo, rarely seen, and seldom considered as important as the mother. Currently fathers are coming into the treatment picture more frequently, and similar problems are being encountered in how to treat them (1,2,9, 11,12, 17,19).
X HE ACQUISITION of the individual's perceptions of other persons and the conditions under which these perceptions can be modified IS a central problem m personality theoryThe purpose of the present investigation is to pursue one aspect of how we learn to perceive others, l e , the relationship between the manner in which we perceive ourselves and the manner in which we learn to perceive others, and to advance a method to attack such a problem This problem can be fruitfully approached through the concept of mediated generalization, as represented in the work of Cofer and Foley (2) However, few studies have investigated the effects of such mediated generalization on new learning Bugelski and Scharlock (1) report such a study using nonsense syllables, while Russell and Storms (8) extended this work to include actual words with associative values inferred from norms on a word-association test In both studies learnmg was significantly facilitated by the mediation processes involved Our interest in studying self-perceptions stems in part from the general significance given to the concept of self or ego m many approaches to personahty We assume the individual has learned a relatively stable system of self-perceptions which we may conceptualize as responses to the self as a stimulus object We further assume that this system of self-perception, because of its relative stabihty, serves as an anchoring framework m the perception of others The degree to which an individual's self-perceptions are congruent with his perceptions of others is a function of the gradient of perceived ' This study was facilitated by a grant from the Laboratory of Social Relations,
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