Abstract
This study investigated the effects of bodily self-awareness and aggressive activation on the ego functioning of schizophrenics. 36 hospitalized male schizophrenics were seen in a balanced design for a control condition, a condition involving a “self-awareness manipulation” intended to reduce ego disturbance and a condition involving subliminal aggressive stimulation intended to increase disturbance. In response to the self-awareness condition, there was a significant improvement in ego functioning on two of six variables investigated, i.e., reduced pathological thinking on a story recall test and increased cognitive efficiency on a card-sorting test. After the aggressive condition there was significantly more ego disturbance on two of the six variables, i.e., increased pathological non-verbal behavior and reduced memory accuracy on the story recall test. These data were seen as offering support for (1) the thesis of Austin DesLauriers that increasing bodily self-awareness can be therapeutic for schizophrenics and (2) the formulation of Robert Bak and other psychoanalytic writers that implicates conflict over aggression as underlying ego disturbance in schizophrenia.
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