Spatial Representations of Transparency and the Suicide Potential

The level of spatial organization of object representations appears to provide a valuable index for assessing the level of cognitive development and the level of personality organization. Our findings suggest that the mental representations denoted by manifest content, including those reported in dreams and in Rorschach responses, when viewed in terms of their spatiotemporal organization, can provide important information about psychological structure.

Certain progressions were noted and instability was defined as the use of an earlier parameter to maintain the constancy of a later stage. Several such parameters had been extrapolated and clinical validation obtained in other work. The parameter which is the subject of this paper was the predicted use of sequencing of planes to tentatively sustain volume or depth constancy, resulting in the cognitive parameter of transparency. This was then surmized to be associated with the suicidal potential, insofar as it straddled the gap in the progression from projective and obsessional to introjective and repressive defences. Clinical evidence was adduced to confirm this hypothesis.