[Changes in the long-term psychosis following psychotherapy].

Abstract

The author compares his own schizophrenic patients treated by him and his co-workers at the Vienna Psychiatric University Clinic between the years of 1949 and 1959 by 'bifocal family therapy', a method developed by him with a control group. In his own patients he has carried out a 20-year follow-up study assessing a subsequent course of their lives. The control group consisted of schizophrenic patients treated in 1970 at the Vienna Psychiatric Hospital along routine lines by pharmacotherapy. The psychotherapy group (n = 116) assessed by social criteria such as work record, partner relationships, children, or social isolation, invalidism at home or in hospital is clearly superior and approaches normality. Yet even they show ongoing signs of dynamic disturbance in the sense described by Janzarik expansive derailment, instability, emptiness) which have statistical relationships with the types of breakdowns in their life history and the kinds of later partner relationships. The author interprets this socially successful psychotherapy as a help in achieving emancipation in relation to a certain situation which arose in its development, but sees in the continued affinity to the basic dynamic disturbance and its influence on partner choice a risk factor of the newly formed family and the issuing children.