Primitive drive-dominated thinking: relationship to acute schizophrenia and sociopathy

Primary Process Patterning in College Students' Inkblot Responses

Holzman Inkblots were administered under standard instructions and under instructions to respond imaginatively. Protocols were scored according to Holt's system for scoring primary process. Subcategories of primary process proved to be reliable and to differ in prominence. A stable pattern of primary process, characterizing college students' inkblot responses, appears to represent students' intuition of what it means to be imaginative.

Paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenia: drive dominated thinking and thought pathology at two phases of disorder

A sample of acutely hospitalized paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenics and another sample of paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenics studied at follow-up were compared on measures of cognitive functioning, disordered thinking, and drive dominated thinking using the WAIS, the Rorschach test, the object sorting test, and an overall index of outcome functioning (N = 67). Results suggested that cognitive regression is related more to acute psychological disturbance than to the presence or absence of paranoia, that the presence of socialized drive dominated thinking during the acute phase is related to better posthospital adjustment at follow-up, and that paranoid schizophrenics show better cognitive functioning after the acute phase. Results did not support the theory that suggests an etiological relation between homosexual conflict and paranoia.

Borderline psychopathology as displayed on psychological tests

Despite the surge of interest in borderline psychopathology in psychiatric quarters, contributions from the perspective of psychological testing have been few. A brief delineation of the range of borderline psychopathology is offered. Broad trends in the test performance of patients within the borderline range are described with regard to: intelligence and cognitive operations, thought and language, reality testing, organization of affect, configuration of defenses, structure of the object world, dynamics and the interpersonal aspects of the test process.