The personality of patients in the 'artificial practice'*

A LL doctors recognize that personality factors are important in producing a patient's illness record. Even in organic illness, personality may play a part in deciding the patient's behaviour. This is an important if secondary factor in deciding the course of the disease and its treatment. In psychiatric illness personality plays a leading part. The emotional background of the neuroses has been studied in depth but the disease process and the patient's inherent stability or lack of stability are treated as one factor. Thus a neurotic has become a person with a neurosis rather than a person with inherent emotional instability. This would not matter but it leads to misdiagnosing disease in people who are not really ill. Unlike neuroticism other personality traits are often overlooked, thus extraversion, introversion, rigidity and social adaptability are seldom considered in the detail that they deserve. The lack of objective, clear, and easily applied measures for personality traits may explain some of this. For example, Rorschach testing and Thematic Apperception tests require both time and expertise and are unsuitable for frequent use under condition