Psychosomatic Medicine 26:172-177 (1964)
© 1964 American Psychosomatic Society

A Projective Index of Body-Interior Awareness

¹ Department of Psychiatry, State University of New York, Upstate Medical Center, Syracuse, N. Y.

A new psychological instrument to scrutinize an individual's concept of the depth layers of his body image has been developed. It is a projective index of body-interior awareness based upon the classification of ink-blot percepts. The measure is composed of images whose content directly represents the body interior or openings into the body interior. A study was conducted with a population of college students (115 men and 70 women) to ascertain the relationship between the body-interior-awareness index and Fisher and Cleveland's index of body-boundary awareness. It was predicted that individuals with a high index of body-boundary awareness would have fewer interior percepts than those with indefinite body boundaries. This hypothesis was substantiated. It was also found that men had a higher index of body-interior awareness than women. It was hypothesized that this index reflects patterns of internal sensory awareness derived from underlying physiologic reactivity levels in the body interior.