ABSTRACT
Paralleling the increased interest in and investigation of the borderline patient, greater research attention has been accorded specific groups of patients that clinicians and researchers have come to associate with what they call “primitive mental states.” Despite presenting various symptoms, these patients appear to share archaic personality elements that become evident in profound regressions, especially in treatment. Their disturbances reflect a variety of etiologies whose common denominator would appear to be a history of frustrating, rather than satisfying, early object relations. On the assumption that there is a commonly shared borderline personality organization underlying the clinical presentation and the expression of symptoms, many of the Rorschach scoring systems devised to assess borderline patients have been extended to the protocols of these patients as well. In this chapter I review those studies that have applied these Rorschach scales to the following clinical populations: eating-disorder patients, patients manifesting gender-identity disturbances, antisocial personalities, and sexually abused females. Several of these studies have been described and discussed previously (in general, from the point of view of the measures employed). Here I emphasize the obtained findings, in part to demonstrate the contribution of Rorschach studies to our understanding of specific forms of psychopathology.
