Gérard Pirlot

A study of the face validity of the 40 item version of the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ-40).

There are few studies examining the face validity of the 40-item version of the Defense Style Questionnaire (DSQ-40). Moreover, the existing studies have provided conflicting results. The present study provides an in-depth examination of the face validity of the DSQ-40. Eight clinicians independently attributed each item of the DSQ-40 to a defense mechanism. The defense mechanisms listed in the DSM-IV Defensive Functioning Scale and their definitions were provided as a guide, along with the definition of those defense mechanisms investigated by the DSQ that are not included. It was further specified that the raters could attribute the items to defense mechanisms other than those listed or coping mechanisms. Twelve items out of 40 (30%) were attributed to the defense mechanisms they were supposed to investigate by fewer than four out of the eight raters. This result suggests that a substantial part of the DSQ-40 is lacking in face validity.

Understanding alexithymia within a psychoanalytical framework

The object of this paper is to provide a metapsychological definition of alexithymia as described in 1967 in terms of operational thinking and negative hallucination. This is a familiar and established concept in the fields of psychopathology, psychology, and of clinical and psychosomatic medicine. From a psychoanalytic and psychosomatic point of view, the term is conceptually close to P. Martys “operative thinking”, as described in 1963, even though we know they do not belong to the same epistemological field: on one hand Neuroscience, Psychiatry and the objectalization of the symptom at different levels, and on the other, as regards mechanical functioning, a psychoanalytic clinical approach within the dynamics of the relationship between transference and counter‐transference. The present authors consider that Freudian metapsychology, as now complexified by Andrè Green, allows for a metapsychological approach to alexithymia insofar as it relates to Martys operative thinking. Thus does Green’s conceptualization of the mother’s negative hallucination, of negative introjection, of a psychically ‘dead (and insecure) mother’, now provide us with the opportunity to describe, in metapsychological terms, the genesis of this particular mode of psychical functioning. Given the mother’s negative hallucination produces a host structure as a background to negativity that will fit future object representations, we will assume that in the case of & future operational or alexithymic &?, this negative hallucination will pathologically and defensively involve the endo‐psychic perception of affect.

Relations between acculturation orientations and antisocial behavior in adolescents and young adults from immigrant families

The aim of this cross-sectional school-based cohort study was to explore the relations between acculturation orientations and antisocial behavior in adolescents from immigrant families. Among 972 French high-school students, 251 were first- second- and third-generation immigrant adolescents. Adolescents with immigrant background reported higher levels of antisocial behavior than non-immigrant adolescents. Separation (rejection of the host culture) had the highest rates of endorsement after integration (biculturalism) and showed a unique association with antisocial behavior after controlling for other cultural, psychopathological and socio-familial variables.