Harty believes that reports of psychological testing frequently suffer from an excess of metapsychological speculation at the expense of clear descriptions of the patient. He deplores the custom of discussing mental activities as if they were physical entities, for example, "parts of the self." He offers alternative guidelines, based on Schafer's concept of action language, for organizing psychological test reports. Following this model, the primary aim of the testing process becomes to ascertain the patient's adaptive or defensive attitudes as they are revealed in the test situation, rather than to discover material which the patient may have repressed. This permits the psychologist to address specific therapeutic issues relevant to a particular case. The article contains a brief report written from the two points of view, to help the reader understand how they differ.