Acceptance of self, parents and people in patients and normals

Abstract

PROBLEM This paper represents an attempt to explore the relationships between psychopathology and acceptance of self, parents and people. The relationships between these three areas of acceptance play a crucial role in Arieti's theory of the development of the schizophrenic predisposition(l). It is difficult to deduce hypotheses directly from Arieti's theory since he points out many courses that the attitudes toward self and parents may take. However, there is some indication that adjustment should vary directly with acceptance of, or positiveness of feeling toward, parents and people. Since attitudes toward people are considered, in part, to be generalizations of attitudes toward the parents, acceptance of other people should vary directly with acceptance of the parents.Self-acceptance has been studied extensively in the form of congruency between the self and ideal concepts. Although highly self-accepting people tend to score low on the clinical scales of the MMPI ( 3 * 6 ) there is some evidence that they are more defensive than others. Some external criterion is necessary to evaluate the adjustment of these self-satisfied subjects. Are they really "super-adjusted" or are they just as maladjusted as the self-dissatisfied subjects. The defense mechanisms utilized by the Ss may be of importance in determining their self-esteem. Bills(4) found that those who externalize blame tend t o have high self-acceptance while those Ss who internalize blame tend to have low self-acceptance. The following hypotheses were formulated to test these questions:1. Schizophrenics should show Iess acceptance of parents and people than non-schizophrenic patients. Non-schizophrenic patients should show less acceptance of parents and people than normals. 2.Within the patient group there should be a significant relationship between acceptance of parents and people and degree of psychopathology.3. Assuming that paranoids and depressives represent the extremes of the externalization-internalization mechanism for dealing with hostility, paranoids should be more accepting of self and less accepting of other people than depressives.4. Acceptance of people should vary directly with acceptance of parents in both normal and patient groups. METHODI n this study we used the ideal concept as a convenient base-line for "acceptance." The smaller the discrepancy between the self-concept and the ideal-concept, the more we say the individual accepts himself. This is a conventional definition of selfacceptance, or self satisfaction. We also used the ideal concept as the baseline for acceptance of parents and people. The more the concept of mother, for instance, approaches the individual's concept of his ideal, the more we say he accepts her. Actually this difference between the ideal and a parent or people could also be called a measure of "identification aspiration". The person is saying that he would like t o be like his parent regardless of what he is actually like. We assume this also carries the connotation of acceptance. It must be remembered that...

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