ABSTRACT
More than 60 years after the first public presentation of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT; Morgan & Murray, 1935) and the Four Picture Test (FPT; Van Lennep & Houwink, 1930), thematic techniques still hold a distinguished place in psychological assessment, mainly in clinical settings, all over the world. However, although thematic procedures ensure utility to clinical psychologists that use them (Geiser & Stein, 1998), they remain far off the research advancements reached during last decades on standardization and objective analyses by other projective techniques like Rorschach. TAT research achieved its main features during the 1950s and 1960s (Eron, 1950; Murstein, 1963), but its further impact on the practice was inconsistent, lacking in further developments or refinements. In Europe in general, and specifically in Spain, TAT has had a lesser diffusion partly due to the absence of investigations. In the Spanish context, few authors (Avila-Espada, 1976; Castilla del Pino, 1966; Fernandez-Ballesteros, 1973; Siguan, 1953, 1954) could be cited until the late 1970s, when only some qualitative advancements for thematic analyses developed by V. Shentoub in France introduced new research lines. Her work is well known by clinicians with a psychoanalytic frame of reference (Shentoub et al., 1990).
