Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [208]
The best-known such test had been developed many years earlier— between 1912 and 1922—by a Swiss psychiatrist, Hermann Rorschach. He created a number of inkblots and asked patients to say what each looked like; after years of experimentation he had narrowed down the test to ten blots, some black-and-white and others colored. In administering the Rorschach, the tester shows a card to the subject, asks him or her what the blot may be or what it brings to mind, writes down the response and, after showing all the cards, scores the answers. Scoring, which requires careful training and the use of a manual, is based on such criteria as whether the subject responds to the whole blot or only part of it, what part of the blot is attended to, and whether the answer deals with the blot itself or the shape of the background.28 Here are some blots similar to those in the test (the actual Rorschach blots may not be reproduced), along with brief interpretations of typical responses:*
FIGURE 15
Rorschach-type blots and typical interpretations (from Kleinmuntz, 1980, by permission)
The Rorschach test became extremely popular among psychologists in the United States in the 1930s and was used widely. For several decades it was the leading topic of Ph.D. dissertations in clinical psychology, and thousands of research papers have been written about it, but the net verdict is mixed. Some have found the prescribed interpretations reliable and valid, others have not.29 Nonetheless, it remains one of the tests most often used by clinical psychologists and psychiatrists.
Another well-known projective test is the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), created by the psychologist Henry Murray and an assistant, Christiana Morgan.
Murray, coolly patrician in appearance but driven by some demon, had traveled a tortuous road before finding himself. He began as a history major, went through medical training, specialized in surgery, and then spent five years in physiological chemistry. Still searching, he visited Jung in Zürich and for three weeks had daily sessions and long weekends of psychotherapy with him, from which “explosive experience,” as he calls it, he “emerged a reborn man.”30 Freed of hitherto incurable stuttering and immensely attracted to psychology, he turned to the study of that subject, became a psychoanalyst, and eventually found his calling as a psychoanalytically oriented researcher at the Harvard Psychological Clinic. He briefly collaborated with Allport, but thereafter his psychodynamic view of personality kept them, according to Allport, “in a state of friendly separation.”
Murray’s most significant contribution to personality research was a three-year project that he and some two dozen other psychologists conducted at the clinic. They intensively studied the personalities of fifty-one men of college age by an assortment of evaluation techniques, including depth interviews, frustration tests (such as a jigsaw puzzle that could not be solved), the measurement of finger tremor when the experimenter uttered provocative words like “cheating” and “homosexual,” and projective tests, of which the TAT was the most revealing. (It is remarkable that Murray was able to carry on and complete this major project despite falling madly in love with co-worker Christiana Morgan, and flagrantly conducting a somewhat perverse affair with her for many years.31)
In administering the TAT, which Murray and Morgan developed in 1935 for the research project, the tester shows the subject nineteen black-and-white pictures in which it is not clear what is going on or why, and asks him to make up a story for each, giving his imagination free rein and spending about five minutes per story. The psychological interpretations of the stories are based largely on a list of thirty-five personality “needs” or motives compiled by the project research