The need-threat analysis: A scoring system for the children's apperception test

Abstract

The study of childhood stress provides a useful perspective for assessing children's emotional status. Thematic projective techniques, like the Children's Apperception Test (CAT), may be useful in exploring children's perception of stress. For this purpose, a need‐threat analysis is recommended to identify those underlying needs and threats that are likely to make a particular event or situation important, and hence potentially stressful, to an individual child. This paper introduces a scoring system for the CAT based on the analysis of thematic data in terms of five need‐threat binaries, which serve as scoring categories. Preliminary data on reliability are presented.

Pathological narcissism in an eight-year-old boy: An example of Bellak's TAT and CAT diagnostic system.

“…This dualistic "need-press" approach provides a way to assess an individual's relationship to the environment, which Murray maintained is independent of psychoanalytic theory. According to Murray (1943, p. 9), "a psychologist can use these variables without subscribing to any particular theory of drives," as Chandler, Shermis, and Lempert (1989) and Schroth (1977Schroth ( , 1979 demonstrated.…”