Aspects of Thematic Apperception Testing: Depression

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Abstract
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) of Murray first appeared in 1935; it consists of a series of pictures on cards, 20 of which are shown to the subject with an injunction to make up a short story based on what the people in the pictures are doing, thinking or feeling, and what he thinks the outcome will be. The theory is, of course, that the subject will “project” into his responses his own attitudes, moods, drives, desires, etc., and the TAT has for this reason been called a fantasy test (Masserman, 1947). Elaborate scoring methods have been developed with a high degree of inter-examiner correlation (see Murray, 1938; Rapaport, 1946; Rotter, 1940; Tomkins, 1947; Wyatt, 1947), but they are rather too complex and time-consuming for ordinary clinical purposes and all too often the examiner may fall back on a method of intuitive interpretation, evaluating responses in the light of his psychopathological knowledge and experience—that is, using experience derived from free association in a situation that is designed primarily to produce a controlled associative process. It would not, of course, be the first time that a scientific solecism had been the means of justifying a therapeutic end, but here there are two logical errors. First, the facts are being selected to fit the theory, and as Harrison (1943) says, “the analyst may project into his interpretations his private personality theories or even his own personality”; second, the experimental findings are not being evaluated against normal controls. The intuitive method is thus seen to be personal, subjective and unstandardized. The aim of psychometrics, however, is the measurement of personality factors, and measurement, says Carr (1925), must be “impersonal, objective and standard.”