Drug-addiction and boundaries of the Self A psychoanalytical reading through the Rorschach test

Abstract

The present research intends to analyse the phenomenon of drug addiction through the Rorschach test.

The protocols, analysed according to the French School Method, have been administered to a sample of 10 subjects. The data have been evaluated integrating quantitative and qualitative aspects, which have revealed the main dimensions of the drug addicted personality, mainly regarding the functioning modes of the narcissistic personality based on the over-investment of limits.

The results show an impoverished cognitive set where the capacity of the investment in the imaginary activity is absent and a certain rigidity of thinking is revealed. The investment in the formal aspects of the table provides justification of the emotional isolation where the attention to the external reality acts as a defence from an internal reality whose impoverishment is perceived as threatening and distressing. Interesting outcomes are evident in relation to the emotional sphere and the attempt of social adaptation from some indexes such as the quantity of human responses which result to be in the normative range.

The Rorschach test provided an important contribution in this evaluation/understanding of the drug addicted personality: if on the one hand it confirmed some basic traits of the functioning of these subjects, on the other hand it provided the possibility to research new and unexpected frontiers that,  from the closure and the over investment of the boundaries of the Self (predominance of formal responses, of “reponses peau”), reaches an attempt of psychic stimulation addressing a “primitive” emotional sphere, in the form of specular relations (reflection responses) or partial (Hd).