ABSTRACT
As Leonard Cirillo argued in a series of unpublished lectures at Clark University in the early 1970s, the model of the formation of symbols proposed by Werner and Kaplan (1963) offers a potent way of conceptualizing the Rorschach as a representational task that allows disparate views of the nature of the test to be integrated within a single theory. In accord with most contemporary concepts of representation (Goodman, 1978; Perner, 1991; Olson and Campbell, 1993; Pratt and Garton, 1993), Werner and Kaplan treat it as an intentional act in which a symbolic vehicle is used to depict or, in some other manner, stand for an object or concept. Describing the structure of such acts, they note:
The situation in which symbolic activity occurs may basically be viewed in terms of four principal (generic) components: two persons—an addressor and an addressee—, the object of reference or the referent, and the symbolic vehicle employed in referential representation.
[p. 40]