Psychobook: Games, Tests, Questionnaires, Histories - Julian Rothenstein (2016)

Chapter 3. The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

A psychologist and his patient, USA, ca. 1950

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

It is not so much I read a book as that the book reads me.

—W. H. Auden

Psychiatrists and therapists have long used patients’ or clients’ responses to images or pictures as the starting point for the discovery and analysis of their inner thoughts, hidden feelings, private fantasies, and unacknowledged hopes and fears. The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is a projective test of this kind. In this context projection is defined as perceiving in an external object (a picture, a story) or a figure or character, aspects of an internal emotional or psychological condition that are often hidden in ordinary discourse. Images used in the TAT are always ambiguous and fraught with implication, and therefore open to imaginative interpretation.

The examples from the original 1930s TAT (which were cut out of contemporary magazines), shown here on pages 75-77, are followed by a series of images by the photographer Sarah Ainslie that were specially commissioned for this book. What do you think is happening with the situations shown in these pictures?