Hidden Valley Road - Inside the Mind of an American Family - Robert Kolker Page 0,62

only his belief that bad mothering must be the answer.

Then came Theodore Lidz with his family dynamics explanation: A child can fail to mature adequately, he declared, if “he perceives very faulty nurturance in his first few years, or he is seriously traumatized.” The Yale psychiatrist cited no data to support this position, just his personal work with families affected by schizophrenia.

A week went by like this until, on July 1, the conference’s last day, it fell on Rosenthal, the organizer, to sum up the state of the field. He treaded lightly, opening with a joke. The heredity-environment controversy in schizophrenia, he said, reminded him of a “white-shirted French duel,” in which the duelers “managed to avoid each other so thoroughly that they never exposed themselves even to the danger of catching cold.” Remaining diplomatic, Rosenthal said that he saw it as a positive sign that everyone was able to come together at all. “This week we have been able to sit here day after day and listen to people expounding ideas both compatible and contrary to our own,” he said, “and far from catching any dread affliction, the only thing we have caught, I hope, is the spirit of earnest concern about the other man’s data and opinions.”

There would be no real reconciliation anytime soon. Three years later, the chief of the family studies section at NIMH, David Reiss, also a participant at Dorado Beach, would still be referring to the geneticists and the environmentalists as “warring camps.” Families like the Galvins, meanwhile, continued to live at the mercy of a mental health profession still caught up in a debate that came nowhere close to helping them. But there was a good reason for this impasse, one that Rosenthal acknowledged in his closing remarks—a mystery that would take another generation to even start to be solved.

The good news, Rosenthal said, was that “all the reasonable doubts that had been raised in past years have now been answered, and the case for heredity has held up convincingly.” This conference, he predicted, “could be remembered as the time when it was definitely and openly agreed by our foremost students of family interaction that heredity is implicated in the development of schizophrenia.”

But that concession only raised a more puzzling question. “In the strictest sense, it is not schizophrenia that is inherited,” he said. “It is clear that not everybody who harbors the genes develops schizophrenia.” Schizophrenia was definitely genetic, but not always passed down. And so they all were still left wondering: How could this be?

“The genes that are implicated,” Rosenthal said, “produce an effect whose nature we have not yet been able to fathom.”

DON

MIMI

DONALD

JIM

JOHN

BRIAN

MICHAEL

RICHARD

JOE

MARK

MATT

PETER

MARGARET

MARY

CHAPTER 15

Nothing may have been more important to Mimi than a flawless Thanksgiving. She spent all day on the meal, and beforehand she usually made a gingerbread house in time for it to be on display. In recent years, as Mimi had been forced to look past the food fights and dish-towel whippings between the brothers, each November still filled her with hope, offering one more chance for a beautiful experience.

This year, 1972, Joseph and the other three hockey boys were all still at home with the two girls. Donald, too, was home from Pueblo. As the day wore on, Jim and Kathy and baby Jimmy joined them, along with Brian and Michael and Richard. Only John was away, with his wife Nancy’s family. With this many Galvins in one place, the chances for an explosion were high. The sparring started early and continued up until mealtime—the boys sniping at one another over who took how much to eat, who did their share of cleaning up, who was a pansy, who was an asshole.

You took too much!

What are you going to do about it?

You didn’t leave me any

Too bad for you

Move