Where does schism collide?

In mid-century family psychiatry, marital schism named a pattern in which spouses, chronically undermining each other, divide a family into two hostile factions and compete for the children's loyalty. Lidz, Cornelison, Fleck, and Terry introduced the term alongside “marital skew” in their studies of the family environments of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, arguing that such chronic household division shaped a disturbed developmental setting. The referent is a persistent, factionalising conflict within a nuclear family, observed clinically, and although the construct's original etiological claims about schizophrenia are no longer accepted, the word was borrowed deliberately from the religious meaning of a community torn in two.[1]

Unit

A chronic division of a family into opposed, competing factions

Recovery means

Framed clinically as resolvable through family therapy, though the construct's causal claims about schizophrenia have not held up

Measured by

Identified through clinical observation and family interviews documenting entrenched spousal conflict and divided loyalties

In the social psychology of groups, schism is the process by which a faction breaks away because a change in the group's norms or direction is felt to subvert its very identity, so that staying would mean belonging to a group that is no longer the same group. Sani and Reicher modelled this through longitudinal studies of the split in the Church of England over the ordination of women, showing that perceived identity-subversion and voicelessness, not mere disagreement, predicted who left. The referent is the fissioning of an organisation or movement into rival successor groups, measured by survey and process data, and it is a different construct from a formal breach of ecclesiastical communion or a divided marriage.[2]

Unit

The breaking-away of a subgroup that experiences the group's change as identity subversion

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied with longitudinal surveys of perceived identity continuity, entitativity, and voice that predict exit versus loyalty