Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature

by Richard P. Bentall

Psychopathologists have studied three different kinds of non-optimal relationships between children and their families. The first involves some kind of disruption of the emotional bond that is usually formed between parent and infant at the beginning of the infant’s life. This kind of bond, known as an attachment relationship, has been the subject of intense investigation by psychoanalysts, psychologists and animal behaviourists. The second kind concerns the emotional climate that develops in families as the child grows older, and is reflected in the concepts of expressed emotion and affective style, which we encountered in Chapter 16. Finally, as we have already seen, some research has focused on the concept of communication deviance, the idea that persistently vague, fragmented or contradictory communications from parents can lead to cognitive confusion in the child, increasing the probability that he will eventually become thought-disordered.