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The author studied fifty-one duodenal ulcer cases in a Copenhagen hospital and a control group of fifty-one employees at the same place. The study consisted of two psychiatric interviews, the Rorschach and Raven tests, a graphologic study, and above all a 'special personality questionnaire … based upon subjective and objective criteria and … termed on the OBS test'.
Even before the outbreak of their ulcers, it was found that the patients suffered intense emotional tensions due to their increased conflict preparedness. They showed addiction to alcohol and tobacco and suffered from muscular tension. The ulcer always appeared as a consequence of emotional complications.
According to the OBS test, ulcer patients had qualities of leadership with both a strained ambition and activity, but with an inhibition of emotions, imagination, and sensibility, with a strong feeling of inferiority, introversion, fictitious optimism, and an intense rejection of homosexuality. Almost all of them had an abnormally strong parent-fixation. The graphologic study showed ambition, obstination, inhibition towards aggression, and introversion. The Rorschach test yielded almost no response and showed only a marked tendency for coarctation. All these personality trends in ulcer patients make it difficult for us to accept the author's affirmation that these patients suffered actual neurosis and no other kind of neurosis.
The author insists upon introversion, coarctation, and, above all, his patients' apathy. He considers apathy a very important factor in the genesis of peptic ulcer, and arrives at the following conclusions: 'Persons who have a great conflict preparedness during defence and/or inhibition as part of a chiefly dependent/independent perfectionistic (expansion-inhibited) personality, and who in the case of further stress use apathizing mechanisms in particular, may run the risk of developing a psychosomatic disease, for instance, duodenal ulcer. Provided, of course, that the so