Multivariate modelling and personality organization: A comparative study of the Defense Mechanism Test and linguistic expressions

Abstract

The main aim of the study is to establish an empirical connection between perceptual defences as measured by the Defense Mechanism Test (DMT)--a projective percept-genetic method--and manifest linguistic expressions based on word pattern analyses. The subjects were 25 psychiatric patients with the diagnoses neurotic personality organization (NPO), borderline personality organization (BPO) and psychotic personality organization (PPO) in accordance with Kernberg's theory. A set of 130 DMT variables and 40 linguistic variables were analyzed by means of partial least squares (PLS) discriminant analysis separately and then pooled together. The overall hypothesis was that it would be possible to define the personality organization of the patients in terms of an amalgam of perceptual defences and word patterns, and that these two kinds of data would confirm each other. The result of the combined PLS analysis revealed a very good separation between the diagnostic groups as measured by the pooled variable sets. Among other things, it was shown that NPO patients are principally characterized by linguistic variables, whereas BPO and PPO patients are better defined by perceptual defences as measured by the DMT method.

Defense Mechanism Test (DMT) and Kernberg’s theory of personality organization related to adolescents in psychiatric care

“…In an attempt to study empirically the validity of the PO concept Lerner & Lerner (1980;1982) and Lerner (1991), among others, have reported interesting findings based on the Rorschach method and adult psychiatric patients, lending strong support to the contention that borderline patients are characterized by a specific constellation of defenses, different from that of neurotic and schizophrenic patients according to Kernberg's theory. Similar results also obtained by Armelius and Sundbom (1991), Sundbom (1992), Sundbom and Jeanneau (1996) using the projective percept-genetic test the Defense Mechanism Test (DMT). However, the concept of PO is not free from objections.…”

“…The stability of the above similarities are both supported and called into question by the findings of Sundbom and Jeanneau (1996). In their study two significant dimensions were also obtained separating the three PO groups.…”

Patient experiences and outcome of treatment in psychiatric occupational therapy – three cases

“…The variables entered were the subscales of the quantitative outcome measures. The PCA is well suited for analysing a large number of variables and a small number of subjects (Sundbom & Jeanneau, 1993). It gives an overview analysis of how the variables of the original data set relate to underlying dimensions (principal components), obtained by the PCA.…”