No abstract

A minority of opiate addicts, especially young males, maintain close ties with their parents. These families, referred to here as “addict‐families,” are characterized by: (a) much greater success by the parents in meeting reality demands than by the addicts; (b) apparent congeniality and closeness but an absence of effective communication; (c) unsuccessful attempts by the parents to control the addict's behavior; (d) a tendency for the father to dominate the mother; (e) extreme overindulgence of the addict by one or both parents; (f) absence of parental support for movement toward adult responsibility in the addict; (g) family consensus in perceiving the addict as failing by conventional values. The characteristics seem to perpetuate the addiction, and the addiction appears to maintain the stability of the family.

A technique called the "Interperception Matrix" was devised to investigate interpersonal perception in eight families in which addicted offspring maintained close parental ties. The addict families were compared with eight matched control families. Several differences were found between the two types of families. In addict families: (a) addicts, their fathers, and their mothers all held the addicts in low regard; (b) addicts were described as very different from their parents; (c) parents and addicts disagreed more in their perception of the addicts; (d) there was a consensus that the addicts' major flaws were passivity and dependence; and (e) the addicts' mothers described themselves as less agreeable and more passive. Addict families and control families were similar in their descriptions of an ideal for the offspring and in generally favorable descriptions of both parents. These results extend and partially validate clinical observations that social perception in addict families serves to perpetuate opiate addiction by undermining addicts' self-esteem. These data, in conjunction with new understandings emerging from the addiction literature, support an approach to addiction therapy based on reframing family perception.

A set of computer programs which calculates correlations between Q-sort decks is described. These programs automatically process Q-sort decks in which the items are printed directly on IBM cards, thus enabling the rapid analysis of large volumes of Q-sort data. An application of this method to the assessment of family interaction is described.