What if one could find out what those fears were, what those desires are, what those conflicts are by telling a story about a picture? The concept behind the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is just this. The TAT has been in use for almost a century and is one of the most commonly used personality tests in psychology, along with the Rorschach inkblot test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (Mihura & Meyer, 2015). But how did this odd test come about? The tale of the TAT is as human as it is layered- it evolved out of a child’s illness, an unlikely creative collaboration, and one man’s insatiable curiosity about the nature of the human person.
The Challenge: Looking Beyond Traditional Personality Tests
To understand the development of TAT, we have to understand what psychology was like in the early 1930s. The most common methods of judging a person’s mind were, at the time, either a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ type questionnaire, in which the person answered yes or no to a series of questions about him/herself, or an intelligence test that would assess a person’s mental skills. These tools worked, but they were limited in that they depended on a person’s willingness to be open with their answers to self-questions.
Why Existing Tests Weren’t Enough
This was very displeasing to Henry A Murray, psychologist and physician at Harvard University. Murray had studied medicine and biochemistry and was deeply influenced by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (as was Sigmund Freud), who shared the view that much of human activity is unconscious, meaning that things happen in the mind that are not known to the conscious person. Murray believed the psychological testing at the time only measured the surface. He was seeking a measure that would “measure the total man- his drives and fears, his needs and his inner world” (Murray, 1938).
Murray’s problem-solving approach became what he termed personology (the study of personality from a holistic perspective that integrated the biological, psychological, and social aspects of the individual). Two concepts lie at the heart of this- needs and press.
Needs are the internal motivations that underlie an individual’s behaviour, such as the need for achievement, affiliation (the desire to belong), and power. Press is the external factors and conditions within a person’s environment that facilitate and/or constrain the person’s needs. Murray felt that one could understand someone’s needs and the pressures he was under and thus understand why he acted the way he did (Murray, 1938).
So, the question was, how does one measure needs and press in a way that is deeper than a questionnaire? Questions wouldn’t work because people don’t necessarily know what they really want, or they don’t even know they want it. Murray had to find a way to catch a person off guard, a way to bring out their inner self without the person knowing it.
Read More: Projective Tests in Child Psychology
The Inspiration behind TAT
The inspiration that started the TAT was from an unlikely location. One of Murray’s undergraduate students, Cecilia Roberts, brought him the straightforward observation. She said that, at home, her young son had been sick, but that he had been using the time to flip through illustrated magazines and now started telling elaborate stories about the pictures he saw. She wondered, would pictures such as these help in the clinical world to explore what was happening in a person (Morgan & Murray, 1935)?
The question seemed simple, but it sparked a powerful idea. Murray was able to see the logic in it right away. Stories are always told in a way that is personal and subjective, where there may not be any one right answer to the image described. Hence, the listener’s own experiences, feelings, fears, and wishes always fill in the gaps. They imprint themselves on the image. This is the principle of a projective test, as psychologists would call it. While one can ask someone if they are anxious and receive a carefully thought-out, filtered response, presenting them with the picture and asking what is happening here will tell much more than they intended to.
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick greatly influenced Murray, who deeply admired the novel. Each member of the crew gazes at the same gold coin nailed to a ship’s mast and sees something else in it- the obsessive Captain Ahab sees himself; the religious Starbuck sees the Holy Trinity. The same picture, vastly different views. Murray repeatedly stated that everything Melville wrote was really a TAT, a reflection of the viewer who is gazing at the picture (Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology, 2015).
The Making of TAT
The TAT(Thematic Apperception Test) was constructed in the majority of the 1930s, in collaboration with Murray and Christiana D. Morgan, a lay psychoanalyst, who was also Murray’s longtime intellectual and romantic partner. In collaboration, they used a series of pictures from illustrated magazines. These pictures provided enough detail while remaining ambiguous enough to inspire a variety of stories (Morgan & Murray, 1935). Morgan authored the first published paper on the TAT in 1935. In the next few years, the test evolved into four iterations: the Series A, the Series B, the Series C, and lastly, the Series D.
Each step added more images and improved the instructions. The final, formally published version in 1943 featured 31 black and white cards with scenes of uncertain meanings, primarily involving people in different situations. A psychologist would choose 20 of these cards that would be appropriate to a given person’s age and gender, and invite them to describe a complete story for each of these cards: what is happening, what led up to it, how the characters are feeling, and how it ends (Murray, 1943).
Read More: Unlocking Minds: Exploring the World of Psychological Tests
Understanding the Scoring System
Murray developed a complicated initial scoring system. He examined each of the sentences that people wrote for the presence of 28 psychological needs and 20 kinds of press, and gave scores of 1 to 5 to each of these needs according to how central, frequent and intense they were in relation to the story. The central character of a story, the one the storyteller identified with, was referred to as the “hero”, and their actions and emotions reflected the internal state of the storyteller (Murray, 1943).
Although Morgan was a key founder of the test, the final test instrument did not include her name. Researchers have since revisited this painful erasure. It was both a reflection of the gender bias of the time and a reflection of the complex personal and professional relationship. (Morgan, 1995)
The History of the TAT as a Foundation in Psychology
The TAT’s rise to prominence happened quickly. Within 15 years of its initial publication, less than a third of the test’s lifetime, more than 100 research articles were published on the test, and several books dedicated to it had been published (Murray, 1943; Bellak & Abrams, 1996). It was an opportune moment; the 1940s were a period of great interest in psychoanalysis and personality psychology, especially in the United States. Freud, Jung, and other European psychologists promoted the theory of the unconscious mind, making it a widely accepted clinical concept.
From Clinical Practice to Real-World Applications
In addition to their clinical work, the Thematic Apperception Test(TAT) became an important player in the non-clinical world. It was employed in post-World War II to evaluate military personnel, to determine whether soldiers would be psychologically affected in combat. This provided a real-world application of the test on a large scale, which helped to establish its reputation and expand its use greatly (Lilienfeld et al., 2000).
The TAT(Thematic Apperception Test) developed over the next few decades to become much more than what Murray intended. It was adapted for measuring specific constructs, most notably, the responses to the TAT were used extensively in the 1950s and 60s to research the need for achievement, an individual’s motivation to do things that are difficult and to live up to standards of excellence. McClelland’s work with the TAT led him to develop the Theory of Needs, which became a foundational theory in motivation psychology and organisational behaviour (McClelland, 1961).
The TAT’s Lasting Legacy
The TAT(Thematic Apperception Test) remains one of the most popular and frequently used projective tests in clinical psychology today, along with the Rorschach inkblot test (Camara et al., 2000). Psychologists have applied the TAT to personality assessment, clinical diagnosis, research on motivation and attachment, and even forensic contexts. Its durability reminds people of something questionnaires and checklists cannot convey, which is the depth of a narrative, and what an individual offers when they think they are just describing a picture.
Conclusion
The Thematic Apperception Test was created from a very basic, yet profound, statement- the stories we make up about others are actually stories about ourselves. The TAT’s story, from a student’s whimsy about her ill child, years of careful work by Murray and Morgan at Harvard, to a test that defined personality psychology for almost a century, is a testament to how some of the greatest ideas in science begin outside of a laboratory, in a natural moment of curiosity.
There are issues with its legacy as well, however, such as its scoring consistency. Researchers continue to question its culturally biased images and whether it meets contemporary standards of scientific reliability (Lilienfeld et al., 2000). But its fundamental premise has never been outmoded- that the most revealing clues to a person are often those that emerge when they are merely asked to imagine.
References +
- Bellak, L., & Abrams, D. M. (1996). The T.A.T., C.A.T., and S.A.T. in clinical use (6th ed.). Allyn & Bacon.
- Camara, W. J., Nathan, J. S., & Puente, A. E. (2000). Psychological test usage: Implications in professional psychology. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 31(2), 141–154. https://doi.org/10.1037/0735-7028.31.2.141
- Cramer, P. (1996). Storytelling, narrative, and the Thematic Apperception Test. Guilford Press.
- Lilienfeld, S. O., Wood, J. M., & Garb, H. N. (2000). The scientific status of projective techniques. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 1(2), 27–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/1529-1006.002
- McClelland, D. C. (1961). The achieving society. Van Nostrand.
- Mihura, J. L., & Meyer, G. J. (2015). Thematic Apperception Test. In R. L. Cautin & S. O. Lilienfeld (Eds.), The encyclopedia of clinical psychology. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118625392.wbecp437
- Morgan, C. D., & Murray, H. A. (1935). A method for investigating fantasies: The Thematic Apperception Test. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 34(2), 289– 306.
- Morgan, W. G. (1995). Origins and history of the earliest Thematic Apperception Test pictures. Journal of Personality Assessment, 65(2), 237–254. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa6502_4
- Murray, H. A. (1938). Explorations in personality. Oxford University Press.
- Murray, H. A. (1943). Thematic Apperception Test manual. Harvard University Press.
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