Note on ‘A Test of Old Concepts by Means of Some New Scales’ by Edgar Howarth

Abstract

Howarth (1980) provided evidence to show that the Freudian concept of oral optimism as measured by OOQ (Kline, 1980) was related to extraversion, that oral pessimism as measured by OPQ (Kline, 1980) was related to anxiety, and that anality as measured by Ai3Q '(Kline, 1971) was independent of the Eysenck superfactors Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Psychoricism (Eysenck, 1978). We do not disagree with these results. However, his speculative discussion of the implications for. psychoanalytic theory does seem to contain a logical difficulry. He refers to the work of Eaves and Eysenck (1975) on extraversion which demonscrated that this was a largely heritable factor and argues that this makes it difficult to justify the Freudian explanation of the oral optimistic syndrome, namely, that it is related to weaning procedures. This simply does not follow. As we have recently argued in a full examination of the evidence for psychosexual syndromes (Kline, 1981), the correlations berween Extraversion and OOQ allow the argument that oral optimism is the special form of Exuaversion which emerges given the special child-rearing conditions. A similar argument can be applied to the relationship noted between scores on Neuroticism and OPQ. Thus, these findings and the high heritability indices of Neuroticism and Extraversion cannot be used to impugn psychoanalytic theory. What is needed .to do this are longitudinal studies or the methods of percept-genetics (Kragh & Smith, 1971) as is fully discussed elsewhere (Kline, 198 1 ) .