Oral Character and Attitudes and Behavior Related to Food and Eating

Abstract

Freudian theory predicts that adult personality characteristics and behavior will reflect unresolved conflicts from early developmental stages. In this study, a card from the Blum's Blacky test was used as a projective measure of oral conflict with 35 male and 61 female college students. The presence of such conflict was significantly associated with deviations from norms for body weight, greater variability in adult body weight, rating food as important, and eating more frequently. However, ratings of preoccupation with food were not significantly related to scores for oral conflict. These findings support predictions from psychoanalytic theory and also point to the continued usefulness of the Blacky test in psychoanalytic research.