The TAT studies the way tested subjects elaborate on their conflicts. All stories are part of their own experiences or the ones lived by the people around them.
Let’s see the list of cards currently used by most therapists and their content and problematics.
This card is the last one to show to the patient and it is blank.
After showing the other cards, you give the following instruction to the subject:
“Until now, I showed images that represent people or landscapes; now I propose you this last card. You can tell me the story you want.”
A blank card leads the subject to structure his privileged objects and relationships. Without a support image, the transferential elements are now more dominants.
From the technician’s side, this card helps you to realize the subject’s ability to structure the objects and the relationships between them. Without any physical support, this card allows the feelings and situations that patients keep inside them to come up.
This card represents a surreal snowed landscape, where the components of the picture aren’t fully structured.
This unstructured card intends to access the subject’s ability to integrate some less accurate stimuli. The subject must look at the picture and make sense of what he sees without concrete objects.
Due to the unstructured stimuli, the stories can be quite creative and different from patient to patient. Often, there is impersonal aggression from forces such as nature or the supernatural.
Anxiety: The unstructured picture can bring some anxiety to the patient, a feeling of insecurity. It is essential to observe how the subject handles that insecurity in the context of the story.
In this board, you can see a woman, bare chest, lying on a bed in the background. In the first plan, there is a man with his head in his arm.
This image refers to the expression of sexuality and aggressiveness in a couple.
The stories can be quite different in this picture. The most important is the position of the man before the woman. Why is she lying down? Why is he covering his face? What happened?
Aggressiveness: The picture has an aggressive context. If the woman in the story is sick, we are talking about a restrained aggressiveness.
OCD: Patients with OCD can spend a lot of time in this picture, due to a large number of details in it. Yet, you must pay attention if it isn’t a way of avoiding the conflict represented by the image.
You see a young boy, sitting on a doorway of a log cabin, with bare feet. There is a sharp contrast between the dark interior of the cabin and the light outside.
This picture refers to the ability to be alone. Is the subject able to deal with solitude? Is it problematic for him to be alone? The tonic centers on the functional immaturity of the boy and the precarious refuge the cabin offers. The cabin symbolizes the mother figure.
Is the boy okay by being alone? Is he able to handle it? This card is supposed to activate some anguish: separation, loss, representation of loss, emerging some depressive affections.
Mother Figure: The context of the picture gives us an idea of the patient’s relationship with the mother figure. The precarious cabin, the bare feet of the boy, they all refer to a weak mother figure, unable to protect him. The subject’s interpretation of how the boy feels gives us a good clue about how he feels about his own mother. Was she protective despite the environmental conditions? Does the boy feel abandoned? Is he afraid? It is vital to have a good definition of the boy’s feelings.
In this picture, you can see some sort of forest landscape with a tree, next to a river, and a small boat. The vegetation and background are a little imprecise.
After a card with tremendous anguish, this one is supposed to bring some peace to the subject. The familiarity of the material helps to establish the difference between the external world and the inner world.
The vital process is to recognize the absence of the object – the lack of a human figure of any kind. The subject must verbalize this absence without the fear of loss.
A typical story is about a family that decides to take a boat ride and left it at the side of the river. It is also frequent to see stories about peaceful walks in the woods or fishing in the river.
Oedipus Complex Context: This card suggests relationships without conflict, tender and calm. It can emerge a slight erotic context as well. The lack of human figures can bring anguish to some patients, nonetheless.
Depressive Patient: It is important to see the impact of the card after the anguish situation represented in the previous one. This will give us a clue about the person’s resilience – how the patient readjusts. A depressive patient is more likely to tell a story of desolation or abandonment.
The card shows a slightly chaotic landscape with significant light/shadow contrast. There is no clear human representation – this is the first card where it happens.
This card appeals to a more primary level, a regression to primal instincts if you prefer. It intends to give us a more precise notion of the psychic functioning of the subject. They can be overwhelmed with the lack of structure in the picture, or be able to pick the small elements and give it a structure.
This card brings anguish, and the patient should feel it as such. Like in card 3, the patient is supposed to recognize negative affectivity in the picture. If there is no anguish, you must consider the presence of pathology.
A couple is hugging each other, where practically only the faces are represented — high black-white contrast.
This card refers to the libidinal expression of a couple. The image is unclear to meet different ideas of a couple, but the central and most important is to recognize the positive affection between them.
The high black-white contrast gives a dramatic environment that must reflect in the story.
The story is around the positive affection and love between the two characters. For example, it can be about an external threat before which they remain united.
The material’s ambiguity allows for different interpretations — for example, the possibility of representing a queer couple.
Identity Issues: The subject must be able to reconstruct the identity of the faces from the ambiguity in the manifest content. That allows a full representation of the body image. A psychotic patient would not be able to do it. They would feel the anguish of fragmentation or disintegration.
A young woman, behind a tree, holding some objects, is watching another woman running bellow her. There is no apparent generational difference.
This card focus on some identity issues. There is a confusion with the two characters – is the girl watching herself? It also approaches the female sexual identification, by assuming a rivalry about a third character not represented in the card.
A prevalent story is about a love triangle. Both girls are in love or want a relationship with the same boy. This third character is absent from the image but central in the story.
Oedipus Complex Context: The relationship of rivalry between the two characters refers to the mother-daughter rivalry. This perception takes the patient, many times, to alter the manifest content. They introduce a generational difference between the two characters that there isn’t in the card. The mother becomes the representation of what is forbidden – the mother is lurking.
In a closer plan, there is a teenage boy with a rifle or shotgun close to him. He is turning his back at the scene behind, where two men are leaning over a third one lying down. It seems they are performing a surgery.
This card is about aggressiveness. There is a scene of open aggressiveness where two adults and a teenager are in contradictory positions.
The conflict should be centered in the aggressive scene behind, and the boy’s relationship with it. Did the boy attack the man? Did he kill him? Is the boy worried about him? Can’t he look at the surgery being performed? What is his role in the scene?
Note: What’s essential in this story is how the subject deals with the matter of aggressiveness. Is the patient separating the scenes in the story? Or is he or she able to elaborate a story that includes both scenes as one?
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