ANGUSTIA Y AGRESIVIDAD ENPACIENTES PSICOSOMATICOS Y PSICONEUROTICOS: ANALISIS DE CONTENIDO DE LA EXPRESION VERBAL

The application of anxiety and hostility scales of the Gottschalk-Gleser method of content analysis to speech samples obtained from 40 psychosomatic and 40 psychoneurotic patients during psychotherapeutic interviews disclosed the following differences between them: (a) psychosomatic patients expressed quantitatively less affect than psychoneurotics, when anxiety subscales and hostility scales were used; (b) they showed a different pattern of anxiety-hostility interrelations, exhibiting significant correlation coefficients between 'total-hostility-directed-inwards' and 'shame anxiety', whereas psychoneurotic patients showed significant correlations between 'total-hostility-directed-inwards' and 'guilt anxiety'; (c) psychosomatic patients also showed higher scores on the category of 'denial', particularly denial of 'hostility-directed-inward' and 'diffuse anxiety', psychoneurotic patients exhibiting higher, non-significant, scores on 'hostility-directed-outwards'; (d) a discriminant analysis showed that it is possible to differentiate between psychosomatic and psychoneurotic patients on the basis of three scores: 'total-hostility-directed-inwards', 'total-hostility-directed-outwards', and 'total anxiety', and that these scores could be used to predict the diagnostic group to which a patient belongs. These results are interrupted as lending some support to the 'alexithymia' hypothesis of psychosomatic disorders, although they are not meant to imply stable personality traits associated with psychosomatic disease but rather a peculiar mode of reaction to interpersonal involvement. The necessity of complementing these observations with transcultural studies and psychophysiologic investigations is pointed out.