Psychosomatic Medicine 19:332-338 (1957)
© 1957 American Psychosomatic Society

Rorschach Study on the Nature and Origin of Common Factors in the Personalities of Parkinsonians

¹ State University of New York, College of Medicine at New York City and the Kings County Hospital, Brooklyn, N. Y.

The Rorschach patterns of 30 Parkinson patients yield no evidence of a consistent personality picture with emphasis on an aggressive drive toward activity, independence, and mastery, which is in conflict with fear of failure and a high level of social-minded morality. Rather the data point more to cognitive interference, dependence, affective instability, inertia, and passivity.

Comparison of a short-duration with a long-duration group yields results consistent with the hypothesis that such homogeneity as may be noted in the personalities of Parkinson patients results, apart from any primary neurological effects, from the sheer experience of living with the illness. Parkinsonism imposes a more-or-less standard pattern of compelling, limiting, and constraining symptoms which may be presumed to alter self-image and adaptive possibilities in correlative ways. The Rorschach differences between the short-duration and the long-duration groups are interpreted as offering suggestive evidence that extended, indurating experience with the illness tends to produce ways of thinking, feeling, and acting consistent with a self-image altered in the direction of constriction, rigidity, and inertia. The younger age, the higher level of schooling, the greater incidence of native birth in the long-duration group tend to emphasize rather than attenuate the obtained differences between the two groups.

Comparison of short-duration with long-duration patients as to changes both in personality manifestations and in their homogeneity may prove to be a useful method in assaying psychosomatic relationships in chronic illness.