A new psychological instrument to scrutinize an individual's concept of the depth layers of his body image has been developed. It is a projective index of body-interior awareness based upon the classification of ink-blot percepts. The measure is composed of images whose content directly represents the body interior or openings into the body interior. A study was conducted with a population of college students (115 men and 70 women) to ascertain the relationship between the body-interior-awareness index and Fisher and Cleveland's index of body-boundary awareness. It was predicted that individuals with a high index of body-boundary awareness would have fewer interior percepts than those with indefinite body boundaries. This hypothesis was substantiated. It was also found that men had a higher index of body-interior awareness than women. It was hypothesized that this index reflects patterns of internal sensory awareness derived from underlying physiologic reactivity levels in the body interior.

The results of this preliminary study suggest that chronic psychiatric patients upon returning to the community do not pose a burden to physicians. This would appear to apply for at least a two-year period. In the present sample of 211 patients those relatively few exceptions tended to be individuals who developed illnesses requiring either surgical intervention or hospitalization for a major medical condition. One question that arises from the low utilization observed in the present study involves the adequacy of follow-up medical care received by these patients. This area poses problems for future investigation involving clinical work in the field.

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The hypothesis was tested that individuals whose body-awareness pattern concentrates more on the exterior than the interior experience relatively more exterior than interior symptoms when ill. One hundred healthy young college students were used as subjects. The hypothesis was tested by correlating a Rorschach measure of differential body awareness obtained by utilizing the barrier (Fisher and Cleveland) minus the body-interior (Cassell) score with a subject's symptom pattern. The latter was obtained by use of a self-administered medical history questionnaire concerning the subjects* symptoms during illnesses for 2 years preceding the study. From the questionnaire an index of symptom localization was derived by totaling external symptoms (e.g., itching, generalized muscle pain) and subtracting the total number of internal symptoms (e.g., heartburn, pain inside the chest). A. direct relation was found between the body-awareness measure and the symptom index.MX. ix OF us experience illness in a highly personal and idiosyncratic fashion. This study proposes to investigate the relationship between an individual's system of attitudes to his body and this experience. It is based upon the assumption that in this system spatial relations are of paramount importance. It is assumed that every individual develops a psychologic model to demarcate his own body from other physical objects in space. This model in its most primitive form is perceived as a container-like

The hypothesis was tested that the more definite an individual's body-image boundary concept, the greater will be his skin response to histamine. Boundary definiteness was measured by means of the barrier score, which is based on the attributes assigned to the periphery of percepts elicited by ink-blot stimuli. Histamine response was evaluated in terms of the erythema and spatial extent of the skin flare produced by histamine phosphate (concentration, 1:5 X 10 6 ) injected intradermally. One hundred college students (55 male and 45 female) participated as subjects. The results significantly supported the hypothesis in the female group but largely failed to do so in the male group. It was speculated that the barrier score and the histamine flare reaction may both represent different aspects of the individual's readiness to communicate with others.