Psychotherapeutic models and the treatment of schizophrenia: the records of three successive psychotherapists with one patient at Chestnut Lodge for 18 years.

Miss Jane Cole was 26 years old when admitted to Chestnut Lodge with a diagnosis of schizophrenia in 1949. She remained an inpatient and day patient for 18 years, and engaged in treatments that were primarily psychotherapeutically oriented, with three different therapists. She ultimately recovered sufficiently to live on her own while remaining in private treatment with her last Chestnut Lodge therapist. Her extended psychotherapeutic encounters at this institution are richly documented, with about 400 pages of transcribed annual treatment case conferences, allowing us to reconstruct her course in some detail. We offer her narrative as uniquely instructive about the utility of different psychotherapeutic models and styles in the treatment of people with long-term, severe, psychotic disorders.