ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the factual evidence about convergers and divergers into relatively simple patterns. It utilizes boys’ autobiographical scripts as the basis for a general point: that all schoolboys are, in some sense or other, ‘defended’. The chapter outlines the defensive policies of convergers and divergers respectively – contrasting them, and considering the strengths and weaknesses of each. It describes the defects of the interpretation, and suggests ways in which new and pertinent information might be collected. One wonders, therefore, if the imagery of the ‘defence’, the ‘barrier’, and the ‘screen’ is the right one. The impulse for self-protection seems to have invaded so much of some boys’ lives that their every move is coloured by it. Openness to experience, defensiveness, restriction, inhibition; all these notions seem at first sight to summarize the differences between convergent and divergent patterns. The nature of the forces at work ‘inside’ convergers and divergers is unlikely to be either simple or readily intelligible.
