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The research subjects for PRP were intended to be a usual population of patients in intensive and long-term therapy (either psychoanalysis or psychotherapy) at The Menninger Foundation. Because of the design requirements of our method of paired comparisons (to be described), the sample size would need to be a multiple of 6. Because of the very considerable time put into constructing each patient's Initial Study (about 40 hours apiece of each of the two collaborators in this, Robbins and myself), prospective patients were processed into the sample at the rate of 1 per month, or (given vacations and other absences from work) 10 or 11 per year. By the time Robbins left Topeka (summer of 1958), 4 years had been spent entering patients through constructing their Initial Studies, and the total sample size was 42. It was felt that that represented all the data that could sensibly be encompassed within the overall design requirements of the project and the time available (from even a large group of investigators) within which to meet them. The total n was therefore 42.
The patients were chosen to be half men and half women. In regard to some of the patients with some illnesses, we had specific hypotheses concerning the different meaning and treatment potential of the illness on a sex-linked basis. One obvious example is alcoholism—a severe difficulty with many in our sample, a much more frequent factor among the men than the women (a major symptom state in 12 of the men and troublesome with 2 others; a major symptom state with only 3 of the women and troublesome with 2 others), and a disorder that seems significantly different between men and women in terms of inner dynamic