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This is yet another massive 900-page American compendium. The subject is the Thematic Apperception Test. The editor, Professor Atkinson, has here gathered together research reports of work done mainly during the last ten years with the TAT in an attempt to assess its validity when it is used as a research instrument on a wider project; he says that this book is “written for the person who is sensitive to the need for methodological advance if there is to be “integratable” factual information … for the person who is appalled that there seem to be nearly as many methods for measuring motivational variables and motivational concepts as there are researchers and problems …”
Most of the papers are indeed highly technical, and relatively sophisticated statistical procedures have been used. Unfortunately it lacks a final chapter summarizing in some depth the general findings described. As it stands, the book seems to me to be of interest to the specialist only. Yet it contains nuggets of information that could well concern a wider circle of students of human behaviour.
Three papers in particular are of interest. First of all one by Clark and Sensibar on “Relationship between Symbolic and Manifest Projections of Sexuality …” These authors had collected TAT stories from a group of sober subjects, of which one subgroup had been sexually stimulated by pictures of nudes prior to taking the test, whereas the other sub-group had enjoyed no such pre-test stimulation. A second group was put into the same test situation, but here all the subjects were given alcohol to drink. Under non-alcoholic conditions the sexually aroused sub-group expressed significantly more sex symbolism on the TAT than did die non-aroused group, which instead produced more manifest sexual content. Under conditions of alcohol both groups gave very little symbolism. The authors interpret these results as evidence of Freud's hypothesis that anxiety causes sex content to be inhibited, forcing sex motivation to fin