Thematic Apperception Test: Tell us a Story with a Beginning and an End
WORK IN PROGRESS
For its exhibition at KIOSK, the artist collective No Sovereign Author invites visitors to help realize a project centered around a new version of the famous Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), created in the 1930s by the US psychologist Henry Murray and the artist, writer, and psychoanalyst Christiana Morgan.
The TAT is a projective test used by clinical psychologists to understand an individual's psychic structure and dynamics. Figurative images representing varied and ambiguous social situations are shown to a subject, who is asked to tell a story for each plate based on the visible elements.
The plates made available to visitors by No Sovereign Author were made from reproductions of images from Murray and Morgan's TAT published by Harvard in 1943 and the remaining fragments of a 1968 encyclopedia that No Sovereign Author used for the production of another project related to psychiatric knowledge, Un Abécédaire de la Psychiatrie, visible at Museum Dr. Guislain in Ghent until October 1, 2023.