An advocate of research into environmental causes of mental illness, Lidz was a notable critic of what he saw as a disproportionate focus on biological psychiatry.
Born in New York City and raised on Long Island, the son of Israel Isador Lidz, president of a button and novelties firm in Manhattan, and Esther Shedlinsky.
It was while studying there with Adolf Meyer that Lidz learned to examine personal history and experience as sources of psychotic as well as neurotic disorders.
During his residency, Lidz met Ruth Maria Wilmanns, a German-born psychiatrist who had fled the Nazi regime in 1934 and arrived at Johns Hopkins in 1937.
Returning to Johns Hopkins in 1946, he became chief of the psychiatric section of the Department of Medicine and initiated research on psychosomatic conditions.
At the same time, he followed Ruth Lidz into psychoanalytic training in the Washington-Baltimore Institute, where they studied with Harry Stack Sullivan and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann.
By the late 1950s, the research group published the first of many articles on parental relationships associated with the emergence of schizophrenia in young adults (reference cited below).
On a 1970 trip to Fiji, the battlefields of Guadalcanal and New Guinea, Lidz studied patients from radically different cultural backgrounds and collected indigenous artifacts.
Publications followed on the significance of paranoia when supported by beliefs in black magic and on personality development in the context of New Guinean culture.
In his latter years, he expressed regret that he could not write one more book to argue that biology-based lines of research and training in current psychiatry are, as he said, "barking up the wrong tree."
In the books Schizophrenia and the Family and The Origin and Treatment of Schizophrenic Disorders Lidz and his colleagues explain their belief that parental behaviour can result in mental illness in children: Lidz's general thesis examined how the socialization between parents affect the aetiology of schizophrenia in their children.