Projective Techniques

Psychologists use a number of methods to assess psy-chopathology and personality, including structured and unstructured interviews, brief self-rated and clinician-rated measures (such as the Beck Depression Inventory), projective techniques (e.g., the Rorschach Inkblot Technique), self-report personality inventories (e.g., the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2; MMPI-2), behavioral assessment methods (e.g., observational techniques and diary measures), outcome and treatment monitoring measures (e.g., the Outcome Questionnaire-45), and measures completed by peers or significant others (e.g., the Peer Inventory of Personality Disorders). This entry describes research findings on the most scientifically controversial of these instruments, namely, projective techniques.

In comparison with other assessment methods, a clinician using a projective technique typically presents a client with an ambiguous stimulus (e.g., an inkblot), or asks the client to generate a response following open-ended instructions (e.g., “Draw a person”). Thus, for projective techniques, stimuli tend to be ambiguous and the nature of response options tends to be varied. The primary logic underlying these tests is the projective hypothesis—in the process of making sense of an ambiguous stimulus, the respondent presumably “projects” important aspects of his or her personality onto that stimulus. The test interpreter then works “in reverse” to infer the respondent's personality traits.

Projective techniques can be placed into five broad categories: (1) association techniques including inkblot tests, (2) construction techniques including human figure drawing tests and story creation tests such as the widely used Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), (3) completion techniques including sentence completion tests, (4) arrangement or selection tests including the Szondi Test and the Luscher Color Test, and (5) expression techniques such as handwriting analysis, projective doll play, and puppetry.

A common argument made for using projective techniques is that they can circumvent a client's conscious attempts to create a specific impression on these tests, as well as the client's unconscious defenses. Clients may not know how to answer in a healthy or sick way when presented with an ambiguous stimulus such as an inkblot, so they will not be able to purposely overreport or underreport psychopathology. Similarly, when given an open-ended task such as drawing a human figure, clients may not be able to intentionally draw a figure that suggests that they have more or less psychopathology than they really have.

If clients' responses are shaped by their personality traits and psychopathology, then projective techniques may be able to yield valuable information about the clients. In fact, a goal of using projectives is to learn things about clients that the clients themselves do not know. Proponents of projective techniques typically claim that the test results yield important insights into their clients' unconscious processes.

Despite the claims made for projective techniques, the percentage of clinical psychologists using projective tests declined from 72% in 1986 to 39% in 2003. The decline in the popularity of projective techniques may be partly due to criticisms that have been leveled at them, which are described below. It can also be traced to the advent of managed care, which has made psychological testing, especially testing with questionable scientific support, less financially remunerative.

The scientific research on the three most popular projective instruments: the Rorschach, the TAT, and human figure drawings are described below. This entry concludes by addressing whether projective techniques can be used to circumvent a client's defenses and evaluate unconscious motivations and conflicts.

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