Alexithymia, ‘pensée opératoire’ and Predisposition to Coronopathy

Abstract

The ‘behavioral pattern A’ and the ‘B’ pattern in selected groups of male populations in the framework of a prospective and predictive study of a large population of civil service employees is compared. The Personality Inventory of Lazare, Klerman and Armor and the auto-questionnaire of Bortner were used to differentiate the ‘A’ and ‘B’ group populations. Selected cards from Murray’s TAT seem more appropriate in this respect and demonstrate the lack of efficiency of certain questionnaires in areas of psychosomatic research. Moreover the selected TAT card responses provide some evidence of ‘pensée opératoire’ or alexithymia in ‘A’ group subjects whatever its metapsychological implication.

Emotional Intelligence

“…Its subjective scoring procedure, however, resulted in low reliability [56], and so the Schalling-Sifneos Personality Scale was introduced as an alternative to the Beth Israel, albeit with little improvement in reliability [57]. A number of projective measures of alexithymia appeared as well but were limited by the projective procedure itself [58][59][60] . Finally, a method of scoring alexithymic tendencies in natural language samples using the Gottschalk-Gleser [61] system was developed by TenHouten et al [51,52] .…”

Use of Projective Testing on a Consultation-Liaison Service

“…To our knowledge, there is nothing in the liter ature describing the use of the TAT and Rorschach in the general hospital popula tion except for articles describing patients with psychosomatic illness suspected of having alexithymia. This group, detected through the use of the Beth Israel question naire or the Schalling-Sifneos personality scale, has been studied by projective meth ods in order to delineate alexithymie pa tients from those with psychoneurotic diffi culties [6][7][8][9][10][11], Our use of projectives emphasized the ability of these instruments to read between the lines of more structured tests to guide us through complex management problems oc curring under pressured circumstances. We undertook this study to share our experiences regarding the value of projective testing in the general hospital.…”