Jules Henry

In writing about the experience, Henry married the then newly popular psychoanalytic notions of Sigmund Freud with the non-invasive, observational discipline of professional anthropology.

According to Harold Gould, writing in the American Anthropologist in 1969, his experiences with people largely unexposed to Western, industrial culture led Henry "beyond the primitive band into the broader and more universal questions of how human behavior (indeed, the human condition) is transmitted from generation to generation and with what consequences."

His most significant publications before his two major books (cited below) include "Environment and Symptom Formation" (1946), "Cultural Discontinuity and the Shadow of the Past" (1948), "The Principle of Limits with Special Reference to the Social Sciences" (1950), "Family Structure and Psychic Development" (1951), "Family Structure and the Transmission of Neurotic Behavior" (1951), "Child Rearing, Culture and the Natural World" (1952), "Culture, Education and Communications Theory" (1954), "American Culture and Mental Health" (1956), "Attitude Organization in Elementary School Classrooms" (1957), "The Problem of Spontaneity, Initiative and Creativity in Suburban Classrooms" (1959), "The Naturalistic Observations of Families of Psychotic Children" (1961), "Notes on the Alchemy of Mass Misrepresentation" (1961), "Values, Guilt, Suffering and Consequences" (1963), "American Schoolrooms: Learning the Nightmare" (1963), "On Regimentation" (1964), "My Life with the Families of Psychotic Children" (1964), "Sham" (1966), "Public Education and Public Anxiety" (1967), and "Attitude Organization in Elementary School Classrooms" (1969).

The collection of essays and anthropological study first drafted in the mid-1950s also examined the influence of American advertising in the Mad Men era and the "human obsolescence" and profitable "warehousing" of the elderly in institutional settings.

Others developing similar ideas included Gregory Bateson (double binding), Paul Watzlawick (paradoxical injunction), Don D. Jackson (the etiology of schizophrenia) and Ronald D. Laing (crazy-making families).