ABSTRACT
Rapaport envisioned the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and the Rorschach as a two-way street. In one direction, he saw the theory as offering the Rorschach assessor a vast array of clinical concepts and formulations that could serve to enliven, broaden, and deepen test-derived inferences remarkably. In the other direction, he saw the Rorschach as providing the psychoanalytic theorist and researcher a means for operationalizing concepts, often elusive and overly abstract, and saw further how this process could allow the empirical investigation of important but untested formulations, adding to the evolving scope of psychoanalytic theory. This chapter is based upon and exemplifies the latter aspect of Rapaport’s vision.
