Spotting and Stopping the Inner Saboteur

“You are sabotaging yourself!”6 All therapists have had occasion to use these words. But how many of us can truly say that anything important has followed this statement? Sometimes the patient indignantly denies that this is so. At other times he will confess that, in retrospect, it certainly looks as though he almost had “asked for it.” But the frustrating fact is that these recognitions always come after the event. The patient seems incapable of spotting, and therefore stopping, the self-sabotage that is to come. Why does he remain so naively ready to be trapped, even after traps have repeatedy closed in on him?

A Rorschach configuration9 has seemed to this writer to supply an answer, and therefore to point the way to certain techniques for moving and changing this self-defeating pattern. The configuration is one in which two seemingly contradictory determinants (or personality aspects) appear side by side on the Rorschach graph, instead of one or the other canceling out its opposite, as one might assume should happen. In Rorschach interpretation the first of these determinants (M)5 is felt to symbolize creative and mature self-assertion. The second determinant (m)5 is taken to indicate those feelings of inner tension which are associated with a negative self-image and with ego-deflating trends. The interpretive problem (in relation to the many Rorschach graphs which show this configuration) is that of determining what it means when self-asserting and self-defeating trends continue on, in this “strange bed-fellows” way, in