Dr Manju Antil (Counselling Psychologist and Psychotherapist)

 

"Belief is to believe in something that is intangible and invisible. "(Napolean Bonaparte). The use of vague, ambiguous, unstructured stimulus objects or situations in which the subjects Project their personality, attitudes, opinions, and self-concepts to give the situations some structure. Basically, the term "projective techniques given by Frank in 1939. During the early '40s. The projective techniques were recognized as one of the important tools to assess individual differences in personality during. As Frank (1948) has so aptly stated, "The essential feature of a projective technique is that it evokes from the subject what is in various ways". Projective techniques are strategies used to access presumably hidden content and emotions using visual stimuli and imagery. They facilitate the expression of internal content that is often subconscious or difficult to articulate by circumventing cognition, rational thought, and normative responses. Projective techniques are predicated on the assumption that a person will cast his or her unfiltered (perhaps socially unacceptable) perceptions, feelings, and desires onto neutral or ambiguous images (Branthwaite, 2002). 

  The conceptualization of projection as a mechanism by which individuals assign subjective perceptions, feelings, and desires on to other people or objects without the inhibition of rational scrutiny is derived from psychoanalysis, in particular, Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) clinical work on personality and paranoia (Hussey & Duncombe, 1999). Freud used associative techniques as a strategy to access unconscious motives and desires that he believed were the major determinants of human behavior. By asking patients to provide immediate thoughts about a particular stimulus, Freud was able to explore subconscious processes and personality characteristics (Steinman, 2009). Projective techniques are typically divided into five groups (Linzey, 1959): Associative techniques in which a particular stimulus is used to elicit the first thing that occurs in the subject’s mind. 

Completion techniques in which the subject is required to complete sentences or drawings (sentence completion or captions in comic-strip callouts). 

Constructive techniques in which the subject is required to create a drawing, sculpture, or story. Choice/ordering techniques in which the subject is required to choose from a group, or to order a group (of pictures, sentences, etc. ). Expressive techniques in which the subject is required to organize and incorporate a particular stimulus into a self-expressive process such as role-playingcallouts, psychodrama, dance, etc. Some of the narrative interviews commonly used in qualitative research nowadays also appear to fall into this category