X‐rays of inner worlds: The mid‐twentieth‐century American Projective Test Movement

Abstract

This essay begins to tell the neglected history of the projective test movement in the U.S. behavioral sciences from approximately 1941 to 1968. This cross-disciplinary enterprise attempted to use projective techniques as "X-ray" machines to see into the psyches of subjects tested around the world. The aim was to gather subjective materials en masse, pursuing data on a scope, scale, and manner rarely hazarded before in any science. In particular, the targeted data included the traces of the inner life and elusive aspects of subjective experience including dreams, life stories, and myriad test results from a battery of tests. This essay explores how the movement and the experimental data bank that resulted were unlikely yet telling sites for the practice and pursuit of the Cold War human sciences. To look closely at the encounters that resulted is to show how the most out-of-the-way places and seemingly insignificant moments played a role in heady scientific ambitions and global geopolitical projects. At times, the projective test movement became a mirror of Cold War rationality itself, as tests were employed at the very limits of their possible extension. The essay argues for an off-kilter centrality in the movement itself, shedding light on the would-be unified social sciences after World War II and the "subjective turn" they took.

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