Projective Testing and Art
Personality psychologists have been using projective tests for what could seem like forever for our generation of psychology students. These tests are designed to tap into our personalities. They are framed in ways that allow us to be free to generate open-ended responses, create stories, or analyse illusions. They aim at getting a glimpse into whom we really are, bringing forth our internal conflicts, or our hidden emotional secrets.
There are several different kinds of projective testing available to clinicians today, where they can collectively be divided into five broad categories; 1) Association to inkblots or words (also known as the Rorschach), 2) Construction of Stories or Sequences (including the Thematic Apperception Test, the Picture Projective Test, and the Children’s Apperception test), 3) Completion of Sentences or Stories (which is made up of the Sentence Completion Test, and the Rotter Incomplete Sentence Bank), 4) Arrangement/Selection of pictures or verbal choices and 5) Expression with drawings or play (lastly composed of the Draw-A-Person Test, and the House-Tree-Person Test).
To Freud, these tests reveal unconscious problems. They tap into a person’s personality, and get a sense for the person’s traits and motives; which big 5 traits represent them and whether they are high on achievement motives, power motives, or intimacy motive. If a person is high in either of these motives, it’s because the person has unresolved conflict related to the motives. However, a recurrent problem when administering these tests is the subject’s emotional state. In other words, how the person is feeling at that particular moment in time. It could be that the person was having a terrible day and this is reflected in the stories they create, and not representing the subjects true personality. Projective tests are also subject to interrater reliability, where different people will rate the same test differently. In addition to these problems, are there perhaps other methods of getting a sense of someone’s personality without having to administer standardized tests?
Despite all the creativity and personality profiles that can arise from administering projective tests, can these personality assessments actually be deemed as the only accurate, reliable and valid measures of personality? I mean sure you can get an accurate profile of a person’s personality and their motives, but when you think about it, artists, musicians, poets and dancers arguably adopt these same principal when composing a piece of art. Poets, for example, do a good job of using metaphors and other writing technique to shadow underlying meaning of stanzas. They get their audience to think and decode information. It’s all abstract, and requires training in order to get the exact meaning of a poem, similar to the idea that coding stories generated in projective testing requires advanced training.
Artists like Jackson Pollock produce famous pieces of art that look as though they just threw paint on a what was once a white board, but beneath the visual there is an underlying story, perhaps one that represents a true past event, or even one that was simple made up on the spot. This image for example, painted by Jackson Pollock is title Guardians of the Secret. Its story; “Pollock recollected witnessing Indian rituals as a child, and historians later argued that such rituals played an important role in the development of his artistic process.[…] Rushing believes that he turned to drip painting in a shamanistic attempt to heal himself; not coincidentally, Indian sand painting is often part of a healing ritual”. In tern, Pollock’s painting began to represent a core value to him, after having witnessed such a life changing event. In such, Pollock’s identity also took a shift, resulting in what his paintings express of him today.
With this being said, the same approach to projective testing can also be found in the work of artists. Freud would arguably contribute to the topic by making a comment on how the stories that support the piece represent an unresolved conflict in someones life. But come to think of it, is attempting to decode a masterpiece of art the same as trying to make sense of Rorschach’s Inkblot tests? When we go to a museum, no one ever interpret the displays in the same ways. Therefore even the work of artists is subject to interrater reliability error.
References:
- Gregory, R. 2016. Origins of Personality Testing. In Psychological Testing. History, principals, and application. 209–249. USA: Pearson Education, Inc.
- http://www.jackson-pollock.org/guardians-of-the-secret.jsp
