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Since   abnormalities   in   distal   upper   limb   development   are   among   the   minor   physical   anomalies
associated  with  schizophrenia  we  attempted  to  determine  whether  patients  with  schizophrenia  can  be
identified  on  the  basis  of  specific  morphologic  and  dermatoglyphic  features  of  the  hand.  Photographs  and
prints  of  the  hands  of  38  patients  with  schizophrenia  and  those  of  42  control  subjects  were  evaluated
and  graded  on  13  biometric  parameters.  Results  were  statistically  evaluated.  A  combination  of  three  of
the  parameters  was  found  to  have  good  predicting  abilities  to  distinguish  between  schizophrenics  and
controls.  Subjects  having  high  values  in  these  three  parameters  were  found  to  have  a  higher  propensity
to  be  defined  as  schizophrenics.  In  order  to  define  a  simple  rule  for  classifying  subjects  we  chose  a
criterion  of  having  a  value  of  3  (in  a  scale  from  1  to  3)  in  at  least  one  of  these  three  discriminating
variables.  This  rule  yielded  an  overall  accuracy  of  81.2%.  Among  controls,  85.7%  of  subjects  did  not  fulfill
such  criteria,  while  14.3%  were  defined  as  false  positives.  Among  schizophrenics  76.3%  achieved  this
condition  while  23.7%  were  false  negatives.  The  technique's  objectivity  and  ease  of  application  could
facilitate  the  diagnosis  of  this  disease.

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The Etiology of Autistic Disorders – Introduction

I will begin with an amusing story that I heard many years ago, a story about a man who lives near a cemetery. whenever he wanted to leave his house or come back to it, he had to cross the cemetery. He had no choice. That man was tremendously afraid of the cemetery. He was also very afraid of darkness, spirits and demons. He made a point of returning from work every day before nightfall, and crossed the cemetery running, in the light. No demons and no ghosts. One day the bus he was travelling on was late, and he came to the cemetery entrance in the dark.

Definition and explanation:
Somatization (Brink's syndrome) is an expression of experiencing distress or stress through physical phenomena. Soma=Body in Greek.

The material presented in this article deliberately sacrifices form for substance. At the outset, I should make it clear that what follows is not meant to invite academic review or academic evaluation. Where Cognitive-Behavioral programs have a virtual stranglehold over academic studies in the behavioral sciences, and where their undisguised agenda is aimed at delegitimizing psychoanalytic concepts, cognitive dissonance will powerfully arrest any notion that something may be amiss here. More to the point, cognitive dissonance will arrest any openness to the notion that within the framework of these psychoanalytic concepts can be a diagnostic discipline that elevates its clinical application to the level of a genuine science.

When I was a child, and my father was in his early stage of his career as the inventor of the biometric diagnosis using the palm of the hand method, he visited various institutions to research and look at hands. During a visit to one of the institutions, he came across a girl who rarely spoke. The girl had a large bag full of broken and rusty keys. The nurse who brought her was quick to say, "Yes... And she tries them at every lock but they're no good." The girl, who usually did not speak, immediately replied: "The keys are good, the keyholes aren't."

Arrested Emotional Development is a syndrome whose central expression in any adult is the poor alignment between heightened levels of intelligence promoting a capacity for the analytic absorption, processing and transmission of information, and the sustained emotional investments in unresolved security and attachment issues having their roots in early pre-genital developmental stages. The therapist encounters this neurotic condition most frequently when asked to intervene in marriages threatening to come apart. All efforts at counseling fail when this feature in personality remains unrecognized and unaccounted for. And even when duly recognized and accounted for, which is far more the exception than the rule, the therapist’s best efforts generally come to naught. This syndrome does not readily lend itself to significant adjustment even with a full awareness of its nature.

I first encountered the term “autistic pockets” in the late Frances Tustin’s brilliant work Autistic Barriers in Neurotic Patients (Karnac Books, 1986). She speaks of capsules of autism which persist well into the advanced years and extend from an acquired “encapsulation” of “the damaged part of personality.” This is precisely what we shall be describing here.

Inhibitions are essentially responses that have evolved to manage high level anxieties. The nature of these responses is the determined avoidance of any confrontation with whatever experiences had originally promoted these anxieties. In this they would seem to share an etiology that much describes entrenched phobias. The difference between the two, however, is that whereas phobias invariably link directly to the original stress experience – invariably a traumatic experience – inhibitions manifest as seemingly benign neurotic styles of attitudes and behaviors with the individual exposing no link to any specific causal agent. To most it would seem that these attitudes and behaviors had always been a facet of that person’s nature.

When earlier we described the circumstances of the child where virtually every experience was invested with emotional significance, and the capacity for rational thought would come only with time, who it was essentially constituted everything that it experienced emotionally. Feeling was its total world experience. For young children, in their minds the measures of everything extend entirely from their emotional investments in them. Their thought processes start out as wholly emotive configurations which, simply stated, suggests that their emotional chemistries at this stage in their development determine how they grasp the world, and the mechanics of how they communicate with others.

Perhaps no single construct in personality is responsible for as many failures in clinical intervention as those which originate with what we would describe as split loyalties. Its most prominent expression is the unsettling sense of estrangement from what can only be described as this person’s life. This is invariably accompanied by a chronic sense of vulnerability often severe enough to become fixed somewhere on the spectrum of paranoid neuroticism. If one can imagine a tree with its trunk and branches growing at a distance from its roots you have the crux of the emotional disturbance we shall attempt to define here. These people live the length of their lives carrying a dark and heavy weight in their hearts. They are invariably at a loss trying to link this feeling to some aspect of their lives that permits recognition, but being considerably removed from the sensibilities of the children they once were they are equally removed from the source of their distress.

A glaring omission in the academic literature devoted to the behavioral sciences is an understanding of the father’s specific contribution to the mind and future emotional development of his child. This understanding, had it been serious and comprehensive, would have contributed much insight into some of the most prominent, pressing and increasingly divisive socio-political issues of our day. It would have delivered a fair understanding of the issues dealing with sexual bonding and familial identity. It would have contributed much insight toward an understanding of the drive that spurs the ambitions of politicians (and not only politicians) and their need for recognition. Moreover, it would have gone far to explain the sublime profit registered by the likes of Israel’s Vanunu and America’s Snowden, along with all the many lesser grade vigilantes. The theme itself, were it related to in comprehensive fashion, could have, and should have, added hundreds of papers and many tens of volumes to the shelves of every library devoted to the behavioral sciences.

With this syndrome invested in personality we come upon a particularly insidious manipulation of an individual’s link to his or her physical, material, and social world. There is even a mild autistic temper to their mindsets. Among many of these people – most notably in their late teens through to their late twenties – we find them travelling to distant lands and submerging themselves there for months in the extreme nature of the prevailing surroundings. Some would reach the deserts of Australia, others the Brazilian jungles. There would be those who would climb the Himalayan Mountains, others may be moved to trek the tundra in the far north of Alaska. All share and respond to much the same history.

The most frequent complaint the therapist hears when encountering instances of a false self is the client’s feeling that he or she is living a life that can only be described as a sense of alienation from the self.  Said simply, these people feel that they are living not as themselves but as alongside themselves. They are living, but living falsely. Not every client would be adept at representing himself, or herself accurately, or in articulate fashion, considering that the false self is experienced as an emotional abstraction. The very concept of the self is essentially an abstraction. But on encountering this morphological development in the hand the therapist would never err grasping what the client’s words in fact represent, subsequently fitting them to the etiology of this specific neurotic circumstance.

People having to manage with this syndrome frequently invite the intervention of career counselors at some time in their early twenties. At this time they are generally called upon to make very focused and critical decisions with regard to their future lives. These decisions will invariably relate to studies with which they can identify, and the acquisition of such skills as may serve as a foundation for suitable careers in the future. They may not verbalize whatever thoughts they may have about aspirations for self-actualization or self-fulfillment, but these goals, however ambivalent they may be in their minds, would be at the heart of all that they wish to realize for themselves.

The Hollow-i Syndrome exposes a seriously impoverished and often crippling conceptualization of self-worth. Individuals suffering this construction in personality carry within themselves the conviction that their existence is utterly bereft of legitimacy or validity. Wherever a therapist comes upon this feature when studying the hands of the client, it would be incumbent upon that therapist to measure the relative severity of this feature which is the measure of its thinness. The more severe, the more damaging it would be to the quality and design of this person’s life. On the same note, the therapist would more clearly understand all that he hears from his client through the prism of this erosive perception of self-worth. Appearances at the surface of this person’s life will almost invariably be deceptive.

The feature that exposes this neurotic expression in personality is the clearly seen waist shape, thinning, or narrowing development of the base phalanx of the little finger. Irrespective of any other facet of personality that other features of the hand may describe, this particular development has a distinctly unforgiving and profoundly deterministic influence on the individual’s personality.  It exposes an uncompromising need for controls.  It underlines in the mind of this person the need to have a sure grip on the reins of everything touching his or her life. Add to this the experience of intense and troubling uneasiness, including the fear of descending to impotence, in the event of ever having to be dependent on anybody for anything.

The subject of these pages on will points an accusing and unforgiving finger at the deplorable failure of all those responsible for the academic education of every student following any behavioral science curriculum. Neither the city nor the century matters. It matters not if the walls are bedecked with ivy and rising from manicured landscapes, or an address just off a busy street. It matters not whether the bias of the learned professors leans to cognitive-behavior principles or to the gamut of psychoanalytic theories. As a reference to the psyche of a man, the academic study and clinical application of psychology in all its forms has the constitution and backbone of a medusa.