Assessing Personality and Psychopathology with Projective Methods

AbstractResearch findings, which are often ignored, clearly demonstrate that projective tests have value in the assessment process. This chapter addresses their value within a broad overview, incorporating projective tests and methods within a single domain. Simplified and misleading models for projective testing, such as the “blank screen” and “X‐ray” models, are examined. Bias against projective testing is reviewed from an historical perspective. In response to these misunderstandings about projective testing, the chapter provides a new behavioral, response process model for projective testing. Ironically, this behavioral response processing model, in which the personality processes are inferred by comparing input versus output, is very similar to the original descriptions about projective processes offered some 70 years ago. Based on information processing and problem solving, the model integrates both content/self‐expressive and structural/organizational components. In doing so, some common misperceptions about projective tests are corrected. The complexity and freedom of the projective stimulus situation and the richness and variety of the projective test responses are the foundation for the generalizability, validity, and interpretation of these tests. It follows necessarily that projective testing interpretation is synthetic and individualized so that projective tests allow one to personalize and contextualize group findings.