Main description:

Schachtel shared with his great contemporary David Rapaport the goal of scientifically reframing the psychoanalytic understanding of personality. Experiential Foundations of Rorschach's Test, first published in 1966, is in one sense Schachtel's extended dialogue with Rapaport (in the guise of Schachtel's interlocutor) about this ambitious task. In the course of his brilliant and lucid meditation on this topic, Schachtel attempted far more than the simple explication of particular test responses. His book contains, and should be read as, an entire theory of personality considered in terms of the ways in which one person may meaningfully and detectably differ from another.

Contents:

Introduction. The Nature of the Test Data I: The Projection Hypothesis; The Perception-Association Hypothesis. The Nature of the Test Data II: The Experiential Dimensions; Qualities of the Rorschach Inkblots. The Nature of the Test Data III: The Experiential Qualities of the Testee's Reactions. The Relation of the Experiential Qualities to Some General Psychological Concepts. The Experiential Dimension and the Determinants. Form. Color. Movement. Notes on Shading. On Content, Symbol, Score, and Percept. The Interpersonal Meaning of the Rorschach-Test Situation.