The Defense Mechanism Test in nonpsychotic psychiatric outpatients and normal controls

In the Defense Mechanism Test, stimuli representing a central figure threatened by a peripheral person are presented tachistoscopically, at increasing exposure times. The threat is assumed to trigger defense mechanisms that are expressed by several types of perceptual distortions. Given that to date no experimental study has validated the discriminative power of the Defense Mechanism Test between normal controls and clinical groups, 99 normal controls and 57 nonpsychotic psychiatric outpatients were given the test. Significantly more psychiatric patients than controls were coded for presence of each of the ten main defensive signs of the Defense Mechanism Test (with a peak significance for reaction formation). Ten codings or subcodings of defense which were particularly rare in the control sample were employed to discriminate between groups. This procedure correctly allocated 85.8% of the control subjects and 85.9% of the psychiatric patients. The present findings allow a preliminary distinction between codings of defense with questionable, moderate, or strong clinical significance, in the area of nonpsychotic psychopathology.