Neurosis and Marital Interaction: II. Time Sharing and Social Activity

This paper is concerned with certain aspects of the marital interaction of male neurotics and their wives: more specifically it was designed to test hypotheses advanced to explain the findings of an earlier study (Kreitman, 1964), partly confirmed in Part I of this inquiry. The findings in question were (i) that the patients' spouses had a higher level of morbidity than controls, a discrepancy which tended to increase with lengthening of the marriage, and (ii) that patients and their spouses had low or zero correlations on measures of personality and pathology in the early years of marriage, but with the passage of time the interspouse correlation increased, with the spouse coming increasingly to resemble the patient, especially with regard to symptoms: conversely, the control couples generally showed positive correlations early in marriage, but thereafter declined in their level of similarity.