Explain various projective techniques in detail.

The various projective techniques are as follows:

• Association Techniques.
• Ink Bolt Techniques.
• Construction Techniques.
• Completion Techniques.
• Expressive Techniques.

Association Techniques

What comes to an individual’s mind if he hears the word ocean. The response may be vastness, beautiful, scary, treasure, fish, or anything else. According to one’s feeling each individual would respond with a different feeling in response to the stimulus ocean. This is an example of the association technique. Under this technique, the respondent has to give his responses on seeing or hearing any stimulus. For example, the word association test in which a set of words are given to the examinee and he is asked to speak out the word that comes first to his mind on providing the stimulus of any word. The response of the respondent throws light on his personality.

Ink Bolt Techniques

There are two popular techniques under this technique:

• The Rorschach Test and
• The Holtzman Ink Blot Test.

In both these tests the examinee has to interpret what form he sees if he is shown a picture of ink blots, which are mostly unstructured.

Construction Techniques

Under this technique, the examinee has to make up a story after he is shown a stimulus material within a given time frame. In this case what is important is the theme and the mode of responding. Some examples of construction techniques are the Thematic Apperception Test and the Object-Relations Test. In the thematic Apperception Test, the examinee is shown some pictures on the basis of which he has to create stories. The kind of stories the person makes up says a lot about his personality. Draw-a-person test also belongs to this category. In this test, the is asked to form sentences, he either makes up some complex sentences or simple sentences, or he may be asked to draw some picture or person.

Completion Techniques

Under this technique the person under study is given certain sentences to complete The sentences can be like:

I desire to………………………………………………

The respondent may say: set up a big business, or live in a secluded place, or bring my family together and stay under one roof, or any other answer which reveals his innermost tendencies.

I am very eager to ………………………………….

I dream of ………………………….

When the person fills these sentences, they are noted by the psychologist, and recorded by him for use. The answers, the tone which has been used by the subject, throws light on his personality. An example is the Ratter’s Incomplete Sentences Blank. According to some people, it is a semi-projective technique.

Expressive Techniques

An autistic teenager learns to communicate with other people by playing drums in a group. A family in therapy makes a drawing together, from which the therapist can observe their interactions and the finished picture. These are known as the creative arts therapies or the expressive therapies where manipulative tasks are used to identify the personality of the person under study.

The theme of the technique is that the person has to interact with the given material. Some examples of these techniques are role playing, finger painting, play, drawing, etc. The manner in which the examinee interprets the given materials gives the examinee clues about the personality of the individual.