Sex-Role Alienation in Schizophrenia.

Sex-typed reactions are contrasted in male and female normals and chronic schizophrenics. In general, the schizophrenics show sex-role alienation on tests which contain a self-image reference (a Role Playing Test, a Body Parts Acceptance Test, and a Figure Preference Test), Female schizophrenics tend to react in a more assertive manner like normal males, and male schizophrenics in a more sensitive manner like normal females. In a direct test of assertive vs. yielding story sequences on the TAT, the sex-difference reversal is significant only if housewives are used as normal female controls. The inclination of female schizophrenics toward assertive story sequences is matched by a similar inclination in career women, suggesting this role reversal is not as critical to the schizophrenic condition as the self-image disturbance. In conscious sex-typed interests and attitudes, schizophrenics do not differ from normals. A theory is proposed relating schizophrenia to sex-identity alienation in the early years of life. Most studies of schizophrenia, like most studies in psychology, ignore sex differences. In fact, it is often difficult in reading the literature to discover whether male or female patients or both were tested. Theories are developed and discussed without specifying whether the theory applies to males or females or both. Nine times out of ten it is safe to assume the samples and theories are male, as elsewhere in psychology (compare the maleoriented research on n Ach, e.g., McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell, 1953). But times are changing. Interest is developing in viewing schizophrenia within the context of the growing literature and theory about normal sex differences in personality