ABSTRACT
Dissatisfied with contemporary psychological, psychiatric, and psychoanalytic theories that focused too heavily on thought content or dynamics, Rapaport sought instead to study the structure of thought. Rapaport believed that symbolic interpretation of Rorschach content or verbalizations was as incomplete, and possibly misguided, as dream interpretation based only on manifest or latent content. Without understanding the principles of dream work, dream interpretation can be misleading. Similarly, Rapaport felt that without understanding the formal characteristics of thought processes, symbolic interpretation of the content or verbalizations was of limited usefulness. Together with Gill and Schafer, he sought to systematize the most common kinds of deviant verbalizations that occur on the Rorschach and to explain the psychological processes that underlie them.
