The psychological processing of traumatic experience: Rorschach patterns in PTSD

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Abstract
The Rorschach records of 13 Vietnam veterans with PTSD were compared with 11 matched combat controls and were analyzed for both content and structural features. These Rorschachs showed an unmodified reliving of traumatic material and revealed the biphasic cognitive processing of traumatic experiences of rigidly defended, affective numbing versus overwhelmed intrusive reliving. They demonstrated how trauma and its concomitant affects persist with little modification over time and confirm the clinical impression that people with severe PTSD have an impaired capacity for affect modulation. The lack of integration of the traumatic experience accounts for extreme reactivity to environmental stimuli: the initially over whelming external event, through lack of assimilation, is perpetuated internally and continues to exert disorganizing effects on the psyche. The authors discuss the claims that the presence of mute, unsymbolized, and unintegrated experiences causes reenactment of the trauma, until the victim learns to put into words both the associated facts and the feelings.

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