ABSTRACT
As practitioners, we can glean useful information from our clients' verbal stories and their "epi-narrative" ornamentations of non-verbal behaviours and unvoiced questions. Asking clients to engage in fantasy storytelling probably involves more parts of the brain than a linear construction of past personal events. Storytelling and story hearing capture us, and they are part of our evolutionary history. Projective methods have been used for over a century in psychiatry, and clinical psychology and going back well before Hermann Rorschach burst onto the scene with his inkblots and his book Psychodiagnostik. By using the Athlete Apperception Technique (AAT) as a clinical tool, the doctoral student was able to see and confront his prejudices and stereotypes and how they diminished and impoverished his interpretations of his client's tales. Throughout this manual, we have emphasised the psychoanalytic foundations for the development of the AAT along with psychodynamic interpretations of the stories clients generate.
