Parental representations, object relations and their relationship to Depressive Personality Disorder and Dysthymia

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which DPD is associated with poorer quality of parental representations and object relations in patients meeting criteria for either Depressive Personality Disorder (DPD) or Dysthymia. One-hundred ten, primary care, African–American women completed measures of DPD, Dysthymia, parental descriptions of their mother and father (Blatt, Chevron, Quinlan, Schaffer, & Wein, 1992), and provided stories to two pictures that were scored with the Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale ([Westen, 1993] and [Westen, 1995]). Results indicated that Dysthymia could be predicted by all object relations dimensions except Aggression. DPD was uniquely associated with problems of managing aggression, maternal punitiveness, and low paternal benevolence. Ongoing investigation into the biogenetic underpinnings of these disorders appears warranted, as is examination of the differences between them.