Perceptual strategies of isolation in obsessive-compulsive personality disorder

Recent findings have shown that the Defense Mechanism Test, a serial tachistoscopic technique developed inside the percept-genetic frame of reference, discriminates neurotics from normals, neurotics from schizophrenic outpatients, and subjects with histrionic personality disorder from controls. The present research addresses another major class of Axis II pathology, comparing on the Defense Mechanism Test a group with a psychometric diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (n = 26) with a matched sample of noncompulsive controls. As predicted, several variants of isolation were significantly more characteristic of the compulsive group. Intellectualization, disappearance of the whole structure, whitening of the hero, and lack of recognition of the threat were the variants of isolation with the best discriminative properties. Codings of reaction formation were not linked with compulsive personality, which is congruent with the recent observation of their correspondence to the histrionic personality disorder. The findings are presented in the context of the percept-genetic literature on obsessive-compulsive defensive strategies.