Human responses to the Rorschach were analyzed according to developmental principles of differentiation, articulation, and integration in a longitudinal study of normal development (ages 11-12, 13-14, 17-18, and 30) and in a sample of adolescent and young adult inpatients. In normal development, there was a significant increase in well-differentiated, highly articulated, and integrated human figures seen in constructive and reciprocal interactions. In comparison with normals, patients gave human figures that were significantly more inaccurately perceived, distorted, and partial and that were seen as inert or engaged in unmotivated, incongruent, nonspecific, and malevolent activity. Unexpectedly, however, patients, as compared with normals, gave significantly more human responses at developmentally lower levels on accurately perceived responses and significantly more human responses at developmentally advanced levels on inaccurately perceived responses. It was only in the most seriously disturbed patients that both accurately and inaccurately perceived human responses were at lower developmental levels. These findings are discussed in terms of the nature and the function of experiences of reality and the importance of assessing the content and formal properties of object representation in studying normal development and psychopathology.

This article surveys Freud's various versions of the seduction theory, from 1896 to 1933. It is concluded that the seduction theory had never been based on the patients' direct statements and conscious recall of seduction by the father in early childhood--unlike what Freud was to state much later (1933). This early seduction was mostly reconstructed by Freud from the patient's verbal material and behavior in treatment (including memories of sexual experiences from later childhood) which he interpreted as disguised and incomplete "reproductions" and reenactments of the original seduction trauma. Further, the external trauma was never meant to account by itself for the later neurotic symptoms. The "delayed action" of its unconscious memory, producing the repression of an event from the time of puberty, was a necessary part of the process. Thus internal psychic transformations and conflicts, anticipating Freud's later emphasis on fantasy and psychic reality, were already an intrinsic part of the seduction etiology of 1896. It is also noted that the father played no central role in the original theory as presented in 1896; it is only in the letters to Fliess that the father emerged as the prime seducer. The implications of this clarification of the seduction theory for the understanding of the changes and continuity in the development of Freud's theories are highlighted; their relevance to ongoing issues in psychoanalysis about the role of external trauma, fantasy, and reconstruction are briefly examined.

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The study dealt with the influence of drive content and cognitive style (field dependence) on the deployment of attention between two competing tasks. Ss were less able to call out letters in a random order when they simultaneously had to listen to a taped verbal passage (at one time with open sexual content and at another with more neutral content). The amount of recall of the verbal passage was positively correlated with the degree of decrease in randomness on the letter task. On the passage with sexual content, field-dependent Ss had a poorer recall and showed no relationship between the amount of recall and the decrease in randomness on the letter task. Individual differences in randomness were highly consistent across several distraction conditions and were unrelated to field dependence.