PSY 505 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Hermann Rorschach, Libido, Attachment Theory

• School: Ryerson University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 505
• Professor: Alasdair Goodwill

Document Summary

Psychological assessments should tell us the nature of the individual"s personality, including causes of psychological distress. Psychological assessments should have two features: they should be accurate or valid, they should be quick and efficient. This is difficult to achieve because the answer is in the unconscious and defense mechanisms prevents it from reaching the conscious. Freud addressed this challenge by using the free association technique. To address the short-comings of freud"s method, investigators developed a procedure known as projective tests. The defining feature of projective tests is that the test items are ambiguous. The person being assessed interprets a series of ambiguous test items. The logic is that the person"s interpretations will reveal their personality, that they will project aspects of their own personality onto the test item when interpreting it--hence the name projective tests . There is no right or wrong answer.