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The purpose of my writing this essay is to familiarize readers with an interesting projective device called the O.R.T. (the Object Relations Technique), which has been described by James Grotstein as “an innovative and unique descendent of the heritage of projective testing on one hand and of projective aspects of psychoanalytic clinical technique on the other (1993, pp. 1).” It is an objectified (operationalized) method for the assessment of an individual's actual, underlying models for relationship that has been employed primarily as a clinical therapeutic tool. Its history is as interesting as the technique itself.
The English psychologist originated the O.R.T. during his tenure at the Tavistock Institute, where he later served as chief psychologist until his retirement in 1974. He had been part of the famous British War Office Selection Board (WOSB) for officers, specializing in mental assessment and working closely with, among other major contributors in the field, Henry Murray. Phillipson developed the O.R.T. during the postwar years. His ideas for the technique evolved primarily from his observational study of group therapy sessions at Tavistock, with attention in particular to interpersonal projection.
Phillipson recognized that the Rorschach (1921) possessed a perceptual openness offering a certain optimal “space” for projection but, because the stimuli were abstract, it did not sufficiently access perceptions of persons and projections onto them. The T.A.T. (Morgan & Murray, 1938; Murray, 1943), on the other hand, introduced human figure stimuli as well as narrative as the irreducible crux of human experience. Phillipson saw that in human figure stimuli one had the most natural opportunity for expression of a subject's actual relational models and that responses should be fully narrative. But he also considered that the familiar T.A.T. images unnecessarily constrained the perceptual space available for full subject projection. It was strictly a narra