ABSTRACT
Like many of Rapaport’s early students, Robert Holt became a prominent psychoanalytic researcher and Rorschach theoretician in his own right. During the course of his research, Holt became interested in the psychoanalytic concept of neutralization or how primary process thinking could be tamed or bound in the service of adaptation. He reasoned that thought processes, as respresented by Rorschach responses, could reflect neutralized drive energy to the extent that responses lacked evidence of libidinal or aggressive drive derivatives. Holt developed a “neutralization index” to measure the degree to which primary process material pervaded Rorschach content (Klopfer, Ainsworth, Klopfer et al., 1954). The index consisted of the sum of all content that involved oral, narcissistic, anal, voueuristic, exhibitionistic, urethral, phallic, homosexual, as well as all manifestations of aggressive or destructive contents, and divided this by R.
