Some developmental antecedents of psychopathology¹

Abstract

For many years there has been an mterest m specific developmental factors related to adult psychopathology The psychogenesis of psychopathological disorders has been explored m many ways Some of the earhest and most fundamental informabon came from psychoanalysis, m which the importance of parent-child mteractions was firmly established Through therapeutic work many clmicians became convmced that parental attitudes toward child behavior were critically related to the etiology of psychiatnc illnesses However, the msight gamed through analysis and therapy was almost entirely subjective m nature Clearly there was a need to mvestigate these relationships m an objective manner and to estabhsh them statisticallyThe earliest approach to this problem was to classify parental attitudes by extractmg information from the case records of hospitalized mental patients A somewhat different method was used by Reichard and Tillman (1950) who augmented 66 cases in the hterature with 13 of their own patients The majonty of these mvestigators were concerned with the development of schizophrema In all of these studies there were a large number of cases in which the mothers tended to be either cold, punitive, and rejecting or excessively warm, nonpunitive, and overprotective toward the neurotic or psychotic child