BESIEGING LASCH.

The article focuses on Christopher Lasch's views on proletarianization of the working classes. Lasch begins by comparing the proletarianization of parenthood to the proletarianization of the working classes. In both cases people who controlled some body of traditional skifis, which only they could exercise through their own ingenuity, self-confidence and creative endeavor, had the rug pulled from under them by modern "technology" and its scientific-managerial "experts." What the subdivision of production, the parcellization of tasks, the outside interference by "labor-saving" technicians represented to the workers, is in the domain of family life matched by the psychiatric social workers. The most recent scholarship on schizophrenia, of which Lasch seems entirely unaware, denies specifically that a continuum exists between the normal and the schizophrenic family. Schizophrenia, as measured by the incidence of inpatient or out-patient admissions does not display strong differences between adult men and women, and is certainly not centered in some cross-sex deviance between mothers and sons, as Lasch would have it.