Personality organization defined by DMT and the Structural Interview

The psychoanalytic concept of Personality Organization (PO) may be operationalized by means of a Structural Interview as well as by means of psychological tests. The present study utilized the Structural Interview and a projective test called the Defence Mechanism Test (DMT) to operationalize the PO concept on a sample of 50 psychiatric inpatients. The reliability of the PO judgements were found to be acceptable for both the Structural Interview and the DMT. The validity, which was estimated as the correlation between the two methods, was also found to be substantial. The conclusion is that the concept of PO may be reliably operationalized for psychiatric patients and seems to have concurrent validity. Both the DMT and the Structural Interview may be used for differential diagnosis of PO.