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Abstract

The prepatient phase of the moral career of the mental patient is examined from the standpoint of the male spouses of sixteen women hospitalized as schizophrenic in the late 1950s. The husbands' interpretations of their wives' troubles are compared with wives' interpretations of their hospitalized husbands' troubles in Yarrow et al.'s classic article on “The Psychological Meaning of Mental Illness in the Family.” Similarities in the structure of interpretation were related both to general cultural interpretations of trouble and to role relations in the family, while differences appeared to be an artifact of method. Differences in the content of interpretation were related both to the gender role division of labor in the family and to the affective tone of the marital relationship.

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