ABSTRACT

Masling, Rabie, and Blondheim’s (1967) Rorschach Oral Dependency (ROD) scale has been the most widely used projective measure of dependency during the past 35 years, appearing in about 80% of all published studies involving the projective assessment of dependent personality traits (Bornstein, 1996b, 1999). The ROD scale has been used in studies of psychiatric patients, medical patients, college students, and community members, successfully predicting dependency-related behavior in laboratory, classroom, and clinical settings (Bornstein, 1996b, 1999; Masling, 1986, 2002a). Few projective instruments-much less one constructed using psychoanalytic principles-have had such a sustained influence on contemporary clinical psychology.