PSYCHOLOGICAL TESTS

Psychological tests are those that are designed to reveal individual modes of psychological functioning. Some of these are subject to strict codification and numerical evaluation that afford an assessment of individual performance in relation to a standard. Others use more flexible techniques and do not have recourse to quantification: the expression "projective personality assessment" is often then used rather than "test." This expression is applied to so-called expressive and "projective" evaluations, the only ones to bear—often, though not always—the mark of some aspect or another of psychoanalytic theory.

Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist trained in the Burghölzli clinic directed by Eugen Bleuler, was the first to imagine this type of test when he had the idea of asking his patients what they saw in inkblots. This test, which has given rise to innumerable publications, is the most commonly used. In his theoretical views, Rorschach himself was no doubt more influenced by Bleuler and Gustav Jung than by Sigmund Freud, although some of his successors have tried to fit him into coherent psychoanalytic thinking (Anzieu and Chabert, 1997).

Another type of assessmentderives from the line of approach begun by Henry Murray in 1935 with the Thematic Apperception Test, or TAT. In these thematic tests the subject is presented with plates (or photographs) presenting one or more characters engaged in a situation and an action that the subject is asked to imagine. Leopold and Sonya Soral Bellak constructed a version for children in which the plates represent humanized animals (Children's Apperception Test, or CAT). Many other evaluations using the same principle have been put forward (like Louis Corman's Black Paw, Roger Perron's Personal Dynamic and Images).

A great many assessmentshave been imagined using different principles, almost always in a psychoanalytic context: sentences to complete and stories to complete (Madeleine Thomas); fables in which the person being tested has to comment on the moral (Louisa Düss); stories to create and tell with the material support of dolls (Gertrude von Staabs), characters, elements of a village (Henri Arthus, Pierre Mabille); interpretation of the expressions on human faces in photographs (Leopold Szondi). Saul Rosenzweig's Frustration-Aggression test no doubt deserves special mention because it is built explicitly on the basis of a hypothesis derived from psychoanalysis ("frustration produces aggression"). It met with great success in the world of American experimental psychology between the two wars.

Lastly, we must accord a special place to "expressive" techniques that interpret the content and style of speech, walking, gestural behavior, but most of all graphic behavior: writing, but above all drawing, a procedure that Françoise Dolto in particular demonstrated (Le Dessin de l'Enfant, 1996).

These techniques are said to be "projective," based on the hypothesis that what the subject "perceives" of the material presented (which is preferably ambiguous and open to multiple interpretations in terms of graphics, situation, and so on) is in fact indicative of the subject's representations of the world, people, interpersonal relations and, definitively, of the subject's own psychic functioning. This often supposes a fairly psychologized and simplified definition of the psychoanalytic notion of projection, although certain authors prefer to use the notion of identification, which is also every bit as complex in psychoanalytic theory. Theoretical simplification always runs the risk of resulting in relatively simplistic interpretation procedures. Correct use of these techniques presupposes a solid grounding in clinical psychology and psychopathology, as well as specialized training. Under these conditions, projective tests constitute an important instrument for contributing to psychological and psychopathological diagnostics.

Roger Perron

See also: Psychological types (analytical psychology); Psychology and psychoanalysis; Rorschach, Hermann; Szondi, Leopold; Word association.

Bibliography

Anzieu Didier, and Chabert, Catherine. (1997). Les méthodes projectives. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Brelet, Françoise. (1986). Fantasme et Situation projective. Paris: Dunod.

Raffier-Malosto, Jocelyne (Ed.). (1996). Le Dessin de l'enfant. De l'approche génétique à l'interprétation clinique. Paris: La Pensée Sauvage.

Further Reading

Schafer, Roy. (1967). Projective testing and psychoanalysis: Selected papers. New York: International Universities Press.

Sugarman, Alan, and Kanner, K. (2000). The contribution of psychoanalytic theory to psychological testing. Psychoanalytical Psychology, 17, 3-23.