Lack of affect defenses, affekt isolation of an inclusive kind or affect inhibition were uncommon in the Defense Mechanism Technique modified (DMTm) when psychodynamic therapy was recommended by the clinical staff.

A group of 200 psychiatric patients, 129 women and 71 men, were given recommendations by a four-person staff of their receiving psychodynamic therapy (PDT; 47 women, 17 men), cognitive psychotherapy (CPT; 19 women, 5 men) or cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT; 34 women, 20 men), or of their having no psychotherapy (NPT; 29 women, 29 men). The staff knew the ICD-10 diagnoses but made its judgments primarily on the basis of information obtained from a clinical interview performed with each of the patients by some one of the members of the staff. All of the patients were given the Defense Mechanism Technique modified (DMTm), a percept-genetic technique, although the results of it had not yet been scored and were thus not used by the staff in making their recommendations. The question of the characteristics that could be expected to appear in the DMTm less frequently when PDT is recommended than when CPT, CBT or NPT is recommended was considered. The following three DMTm characteristics were predicted to appear less frequently in the PDT patients than in the other three groups: a lack of affect defenses, the presence of affect isolation of an inclusive kind and affect inhibition. This was found to hold, both for the male and for the female patients. The occurrence of inclusive affect isolation was found to be the most decisive characteristic