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But projection is not especially created for the purpose of defense, it also comes into being where there are no conflicts.
The various methods of personality assessment that have become known as projective tests developed slowly over an extended period of time.1 In fact, in his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci explained
the interpretive value of paint blots as he analyzed his students' descriptions of what they thought the designs looked like. Through the process of projection—the basis of all projective techniques—subjects reveal their private worlds and personality processes by reacting to the various types of stimuli presented.2 Thus, projective testing is simply a standardized procedure, one that Menninger called an x-ray of the personality.3
The analysis of a patient's drawings—which began initially as a tool to measure intelligence4—quickly became a popular projective technique, because the test is easy to administer and has a rich clinical yield. The subject is simply asked to draw a person; a house, tree, and person; a family; an animal; the worst thing imaginable; or other relevant topics. The sketches provide a medium for interpreting symbols and observing mechanisms of displacement and substitution from a perspective other than dream analysis, symptom expression, or patient associations. Projective drawings, in addition to other projective tests, such as the Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Test, have long been part of the traditional psychological assessment battery.
Projective drawings are perhaps the least standardized of the many projective tests because there are no established norms, and interpretation is often highly subjective. In fact, the analysis of figure drawings has been criticized—and sometimes even eschewed—primarily for two reasons. First, some psycho