ABSTRACT
There is a Chinese saying that a picture is worth more than a thousand words. The meaningful reactions to blots consist of pictures. It is reasonable to expect that they tell a great deal even when not classified according to the formal criteria. The link between the verbal content describing the images contained in perceptanalytic responses and the formal aspects expressed by the area and determinant components is close logically and psychologically: content and the formal components could not exist one without the other. Both content and the formal features are distinct and different aspects of one and the same psychological process, the perceptanalytic response. However, once separated, they have meanings of their own and to a large extent can be measured and investigated separately. A human being has both height and weight; both coexist in the same organism and a person’s height cannot exist independently of his weight. Nevertheless, both are measured independently, having different meanings and to some extent a different etiology. The correlation between them is not perfect. Similarly, content and the formal aspects of the perceptanalytic responses are not perfectly correlated and both must be considered to get a more complete and more adequate idea of the subject’s personality. There can be unusual content in a record containing none of the more important formal components, i.e., no M, no CR, and few W; and there can be relatively little content of interest in a record with a great variety of formal components.
