The Privileged Early Life of Henry Murray

Henry A. Murray was born in 1893 to a patrician New York family. It was a family so wealthy that the lavishness of their summer home, Wave Crest (later converted to a country club), embarrassed Murray, even among the wealthiest of his friends (Anderson Reference Anderson, Gieser and Stein1999, 23). Henry often joined his parents at their box at the opera and on regular trips to Europe (Robinson Reference Robinson1992, 18). In their life of wealth and security, the Murrays took little notice of immigrants, poverty, or disease (ibid., 9–11). By his own account Henry Murray's memories of his first twenty-two years were filled with

According to his biographer, Murray remained largely unaware of the ills of society until he proudly developed, in middle age, a wider social awareness (ibid.).

Murray went on to attend Harvard, where he earned below-average grades (Murray [1967] Reference Murray and Shneidman1981, 53), and where Hugo Münsterberg's approach to psychology sent him looking for the nearest exit (Murray [1940] Reference Murray and Shneidman1981, 293). He subsequently earned an M.D. at Columbia, only to do further work in biology which earned him an M.A. Murray published in the field of biology, and earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Cambridge in 1927 (Anderson Reference Anderson, Gieser and Stein1999, 23). It was not his academic work at Cambridge, however, that would set the course of his later career, but rather the “profound affectional upheaval” that he experienced there. This upheaval was triggered by Murray's encounter with great works of art and literature, and was shaped by two of his most lasting influences: the work of Carl Jung, and the Romantic literary tradition (ibid.).

Murray's Romantic Awakening

A thread of Romanticism runs throughout Murray's work and is intimately wound up in his conception of the Thematic Apperception Test.Footnote ² Like the Romantic writers he idolized, Murray was fascinated by the prospect of transcending the ambiguity and uncertainty of the phenomenal world and using the imagination to enter a state of ideal wholeness. To the Romantic mind, the sovereignty of the imagination challenged a bloodless rationalism and a dry empiricism “enslaved to ‘fact’” (Eagleton 1983, 19–20). Early German Romanticism, for example, responded to the many philosophical systems that claimed to be a genuine “science” by insisting that the only way to deal with matters beyond the limits of philosophy was through poetry (Amerikas Reference Amerikas and Amerikas2000, 11). Goethe, Wordsworth, and Shelley all saw their personal impressions, moods, feelings, and sentiments projected through their imagination.

The work that caused Murray's great emotional upheaval was Herman Melville's Moby Dick. In Melville, Murray found a man “with the myth-making powers of a Blake, a hive of significant associations, who was capable of reuniting what science had put asunder – pure perception and relevant emotion – and doing it in an exultant way that was acceptable to skepticism” (Murray Reference Murray1951, 438). He felt that Melville deserved “to be commemorated as the literary discoverer of another and more important part of nature, namely, the Darkest Africa of the mind, the mythological unconscious,” for as a “depth psychologist he belongs with Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, the greatest in the centuries before Freud” (Murray Reference Murray and Melville1949, 10). Murray was convinced that Melville had not only been the literary discoverer of the mind, but had made this discovery sooner than any other and “with more genuine comprehension than any other writer” (Murray Reference Murray1951, 439).

In his psychological work Murray would aspire to match Melville's literary ability. Like his Romantic forerunners, Murray felt that science had become sterile and dogmatic; he believed that literature and art could go beyond the superficiality of much of scientific thought and practice. Throughout his psychological career Murray evinced disillusionment with the state of academia and the world in general. The burgeoning field of psychology had veered too far away from creativity, emotion, and imagination; by the middle of the twentieth century, he felt that wonder and reverence had largely given way to “the humors of a waning ethos: disillusionment, cynicism, disgust, and gnawing envy” (ibid., 435–436). He had been “swept by Melville's gale and shaken by his appalling sea dragon” before he had acquired “the all-leveling academic oil that is poured on brewed-up waters” (ibid.). He had even advocated for cooperation between psychology and literary criticism, feeling that such a coming together would benefit both disciplines. And of course he felt that Melville's world of “wondrous depths” would be an ideal place for the two disciplines to meet (ibid., 440).

Murray spent decades submerged in these depths. He was confident in psychoanalyzing Melville through the characters in his fiction, much like Novalis, who claimed to have understood a writer only when he was able to, “without diminishing his individuality, translate him and alter him in manifold ways” and ultimately to “act in his spirit” (Larmore Reference Larmore and Amerikas2000, 156). Murray, for example, interpreted Ahab's death in Moby Dick as a signal of Melville's permanent attachment to the image of his mother, as well as prescient foresight into the American middle class submission to paternalism (Murray Reference Murray1951, 451).

Since it was Murray's wont to interpret the unconscious aspects of an author's personality through his texts, it is helpful to look more closely at what Melville himself believed his influences were, not only because Murray published extensively on Melville's work, but also because there was no separation between the work and the man for Murray. From Melville's own perspective it was his textual encounter with Shakespeare that caused him to reevaluate his work with more ambition and at a higher level of complexity (Arac Reference Arac and Brown2000, 292). He strove to join “Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, – even though it be covertly and by snatches” (Murray Reference Murray and Melville1949, 424).

Murray similarly considered Shakespeare to be “the greatest of analysts,” and his writing is replete with references to Shakespeare (Murray [1940] Reference Murray and Shneidman1981, 307). In his “Letter about the novel,” Friedrich Schlegel wrote that “it is Shakespeare who forms ‘the actual centre, the core of the Romantic imagination’” (Arac Reference Arac and Brown2000, 290). Only in the Romantic period did Hamlet become a subject for critics, some of whom performed speculative psychological interpretations of his character and its development (ibid., 283). This sort of “character criticism,” which Murray mimicked, became prevalent all over England and Germany and its spread closely paralleled psychology's (ibid.). Through the role that Hamlet played in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Hamlet became inseparable from the emergent form of the nineteenth century: the novel (ibid., 278). Some have argued that Goethe's novel began to form a culture of the unconscious (Oberlin Reference Oberlin2007), and Freud acknowledged Goethe's historical connection to psychoanalysis in his 1930 Goethe Prize acceptance speech (Nicholls Reference Nicholls, Nicholls and Liebscher2010, 91). While it has been argued that Freud did not present Goethe's conception of science correctly in this speech (Margolis Reference Margolis, Amrine, Zucker and Wheeler1987, 85), others point out that Goethe was invoked by Freud as a cultural authority instead of a scientific authority, since by 1930 Goethe had become a person of fundamental “justification of the Geistewissenschaften” as elaborated by Wilhelm Dilthey (Nicholls Reference Nicholls, Nicholls and Liebscher2010, 93).

To interpret a text as an author's projection of elemental aspects of his or her personality may seem more like a technique of literary criticism than of science, but Murray disdained such distinctions between scientific criticism and literary criticism; he viewed them as part of the modern “inclination to dissect the subtlest orders of man's wit with ever sharper instruments of depreciation” (Murray Reference Murray1951, 435–436). This distinction was in many ways counter to Murray's view of psychology and his Romantic view of interpretation. It is important to consider the continuity between Murray's views on literary interpretation and his view of psychology given that Murray's views on interpretation played a central role in assessing men for the Office of Strategic Services in the Second World War, and continue to influence the contemporary fields of psychology, business, and jurisprudence. The prevalence of the TAT, like the Rorschach, signals a “specific concept of self,” a “historical apperceptive self” from the nineteenth century that insists “on relations of depth and surface, inner and outer life, and the inseparability of ideation and effect” (Galison Reference Galison and Daston2007, 277).

Murray, Jung, and the Turn to Psychology

Murray's wife had accompanied him to Cambridge, and the couple had soon been followed by a pair of married friends, William and Christiana Morgan. Christiana had introduced Murray to the work of Carl Jung, and while in New York both had participated in an evening course on nineteenth-century thought at the New School for Social Research (Robinson Reference Robinson1992, 101). In this course Murray and Christiana steeped themselves in Rousseau, Fichte, Schelling, and Coleridge as well as Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer (ibid.). By this time Murray was already engaged in an affair with Alma Rosenthal, his Viennese laboratory assistant and a friend of Anna Freud (ibid., 96). Still, it was not his wife nor his lover who captured Murray's sexual interest, but rather Christiana Morgan. Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious seemed to justify the desire he and Christiana felt for one another, insofar as it suggested that their desire had “mysterious origins in the unconscious recesses of their fullest selves” (ibid. 95, 103).

In 1925 Murray traveled to Switzerland and met the man who had swung open the “great flood gates of the wonder-world” (Murray [1940] Reference Murray and Shneidman1981, 294). Carl Jung was “the first full blooded, spherical – and Goethean . . . – intelligence” Murray had met (ibid.). Every day for three weeks Murray and Jung “talked for hours, sailing down the lake and smoking before the hearth of [Jung’s] Faustian retreat”; when they had finished, Murray believed he “had experienced the unconscious, something not to be drawn out of books” – an interesting statement, given the power narrative was to have for Murray (ibid.). Murray claimed to have admired Jung more than any man he had ever met, but he was not blind to Jung's foibles (Robinson Reference Robinson1992, 126). In fact, he analyzed Jung and judged that he was “a borderline psychotic” with “a terrific imagination” and a “terrific way of making up reasons for his constructions of the world” (ibid.). Despite such misgivings, there were enough continuities between the two men that Murray left Switzerland feeling like “a reborn man” who had “decided on depth psychology” (ibid., 126, 128)

Jung had tried to steer Murray away from a career in psychology, but Jung's approach to the field had so enamored Murray that he abandoned biology and set out to follow in the great man's footsteps. By 1929, Murray had replaced Morton Prince as director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic and become an assistant professor of psychology, despite having no qualifications for such a position (ibid., 142). Prince had established the Clinic with the help of his friend, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell, who directed the Department of Philosophy and Psychology to implement the clinic during the 1926–1927 academic year. The clinic itself was not to be located within the department, but in a house five minutes away (Triplet Reference Triplet1992, 302). Edwin G. Boring, while not objecting to Murray's position as Prince's assistant, did lead a contingent of faculty from the Department in opposing Murray's appointment as the clinic's director based on the facts that Murray did not possess a PhD in psychology (ibid., 303). While Murray readily admitted that he was unqualified to be “squeezed into the Harvard faculty by some sort of high-hushed finagling engineered by Professor L. J. Henderson,” he was nonetheless critical of, and repelled by, what he felt were psychology's trivial aspects (Murray [1967] Reference Murray and Shneidman1981, 54). He had expected that psychologists would be interested in the human functioning in its environment, but this was not so. Murray found instead that “almost everyone was nailed down to some piece of apparatus, measuring a small segment of the nervous system as if it were isolated from the entrails” (ibid.). Murray had little respect for many of his colleagues and believed that they went about their work with a “trained incapacity” and “tunnel vision” (Murray et al. Reference Murray1938, 25).

Murray reckoned that his vision was wider ranging and more penetrating than that of his colleagues, and that his vision would allow him to bring the darker recesses of the unconscious to light (Anderson Reference Anderson, Gieser and Stein1999, 25). His major work, Explorations in Personality, makes it clear that Murray never suffered from a lack of confidence; as his biographer put it, there was always a “hint of mild delusion in Murray's self-presentation” (Robinson Reference Robinson1992, 6). He justified the bold and ambitious speculations that guide Explorations with the telling generalization of man's faith in man's own omnipotence and omnicognizance. Indeed, his development of the Thematic Apperception Test, and his belief that it was much more effective than any other psychological method for understanding the deeper layers of a personality, expresses an extreme confidence in his methods (Murray with Morgan [1935] Reference Murray, Morgan and Shneidman1981, 408). The TAT brought to light the most significant of data, providing the experimenter with a “glimpse of a most wondrous terrain” marked by “mysterious formations” (ibid., 728–729) The test subject was asked to write short imaginative narratives about images believed to evoke fantasy and imagery. Therefore one could easily be subjected to the TAT “without the slightest realization that he had provided the experimenter with a fluoroscopic screen for apperceiving his emotional skeleton” (Murray and Morgan [1936] Reference Murray, Morgan and Shneidman1981, 379).

Murray's metaphor for how the test worked shifted often; in some descriptions, the fluoroscopic screen became unnecessary as a subject's deep recesses could also be revealed by the experimenter's “X-Ray eye” (ibid.). In another description the metaphor of superhuman vision was dropped; instead, the subject exposes, or better yet divulges, his inner forces and arrangements to the experimenter with “double hearing” (Murray with Morgan [1935] Reference Murray, Morgan and Shneidman1981, 390). The TAT's illustrations “immediately double the observer's language with a response” that maps the observer's inner depths, just as the ink blot cards of the Rorschach test did (Galison Reference Galison and Daston2007, 257). A sensory or instrumental enhancement is present in every metaphor used in describing the test, which is interesting given that there were no enhancements in the actual test – aside from the interpretative ability the experimenter was presumed to possess. Murray found the analysis of metaphors to be extremely useful, but might not have appreciated the analysis of the metaphors he used in describing his TAT, as he believed that “to be . . . productive in psychology, it . . . [was] better not to be . . . critical.” Which was probably just as well, given that his goal was to understand human nature so that man may “explore his soul and observe the conduct of his fellows . . . ever animated by the faith that [by] gaining mastery through knowledge he may eventually surmount himself” (Murray et al. Reference Murray1938, 35).

The Dredge of Personality: The TAT and Its Context

Murray and Christiana Morgan created the Thematic Apperception Test together, though her role would be subsequently and increasingly minimized. As a species of projective test they designed it to dredge up the depths of an individual's unconscious and project these depths onto an ambiguous image by means of a fictional narrative. Just how a fictional narrative projects one's depths is an interesting question, one that entails further questions about the means of text, interpretation, expertise, verification, and the mechanics of projection.

To find a historical precedent for such a conception of narrative one may look to the work of Friedrich Schlegel, who proposed in his Philosophical Fragments that “every human being who is cultivated and cultivates himself contains a novel with himself” (Arac Reference Arac and Brown2000, 290). Schlegel's view of an author's inner-life and the author's works themselves is similar to the suppositions that underlie the TAT. For Schlegel, “Many of the very best novels are compendia, encyclopaedias of the whole spiritual life of a brilliant individual” (ibid.). Part of the justification for the TAT was nearly identical, in that it presumed that “a great deal of written fiction is the conscious or unconscious expression of the author's experiences or fantasies,” which come to be known through the process of projection, a process recognized by psychoanalysts (Murray with Morgan [1935] Reference Murray, Morgan and Shneidman1981, 390–391). The textualization of a person's mental processes within fictional narrative was known to psychoanalysts because psychoanalysis was itself a continuation of the nineteenth-century history of the inner-life, as well as the Romantic writing and criticism that is a large part of that history (and continues to influence our intellectual lives, to some degree, even today).

In turning to Henry Murray's most influential work of psychology, Explorations in Personality, published in the late 1930s, it is clear how Murray conceptualized his own place within the field of psychology. He believed that the “idea that the ‘real facts’ are to be found not on the surface of the body or in the full light of consciousness but in the darker, blinder recesses of the psyche was . . . anathema to the majority of academic psychologists, who were militantly engaged in a competitive endeavor to mold psychology in the image of physics” (Murray [1967] Reference Murray and Shneidman1981, 60). Murray divided the field of psychology into two classes holding opposite conceptual positions. The psychologists mentioned above were deemed “peripheralists”; they saw excitations in the brain as caused by objectively discernible phenomena, peripheral to the brain yet determining all mental phenomena. These psychologists were objectivists because they strove for agreement among trained observers and excluded interpretation. Their speculation on the brain typically resorted to mechanistic or physiological explanations based on a sort of elementarist assumption, insofar as it regarded personality as the sum total or product of these mechanistic or physiological elements rather than a unity that could be classified into parts. They were also sensationalists; they thought everything psychological originated in external sensations and were imprinted on a docile mind (Murray et al. Reference Murray1938, 7–9). Murray had little sympathy for this type of psychology.

Opposed to peripheralists in Murray's thinking were the “centralists,” who were interested in subjective facts of emotional or purposive significance, and who were primarily concerned with the governing process of the brain. According to Murray, they were conceptualists in that they investigated the intangible parts of personality, which they considered to be a complex unity of dynamic forces, drives, and urges that served as a catalyst for action. Murray himself could not accept a system of psychology that did not include a theory of drives, needs, or conations which had long and complex conceptual histories reaching back to Schiller and running through Schopenhauer and Freud (ibid., 297, 300).

Unlike the more “thoughtful” centralists, Murray held that the peripheralists tended toward academic zealotry and scientism, while centralists like himself were found among psychoanalysts, physicians, and social philosophers (ibid., 9). Murray saw the peripheralists as largely ignorant of the techniques that centralists used for “exposing what occurs behind [their] stilted laboratory attitudes” (Murray [1940] Reference Murray and Shneidman1981, 292). For Murray, however, literacy and theory were necessary qualities of the successful psychologist, especially given that psychoanalysts had undoubtedly “read more and to better profit in the great works of literature (collection of the best guesses of highly conscious men), and this practice has served to sensitize and broaden their awareness” (ibid.). Murray believed the peripheralists’ strict adherence to scientific methods was not particularly helpful for the growing field of psychology. Murray thought that in the infancy of a complex science, a few good generalizations could be more effective in advancing knowledge than the careful acquisition of data (ibid., 21). For Murray psychoanalysis had provided just these kinds of mastering generalizations, and in so doing had undeniably enriched of our understanding.

Murray knew that his theorizing incurred the disapproval of Edwin G. Boring and of Karl Lashley, both of whom pressured Harvard President James B. Conant for Murray's dismissal in 1936 when he was considered for promotion. Murray was denied tenure, but retained his job and gained the title of Associate Professor due to the efforts of Gordon Allport, Alfred North Whitehead, and the Rockefeller Foundation, which had been funding the Psychological Clinic throughout the depression (Murray [1967] Reference Murray and Shneidman1981, 59). Lashley was so angered by Murray's continued presence he was prevented from leaving Harvard only when he was given a specially created position, one that allowed him to avoid all responsibility to and contact with the newly formed Department of Psychology (Triplet 305).

Apperception was key to the centralist program as Murray conceived it. For him, apperception was the largely unconscious and inarticulate intrusion of affections and images evoked by objective facts, which work by a sort of non-logical inference (Murray et al. Reference Murray1938, 213). He claimed that novelists and dramatists had a rich apperceptive ability, whereas scientists had a diminished ability to apperceive such things as psychological events (ibid., 246). Such an idea follows from Jung's contention that the symbolic depth of the world is increased the more the unconscious influences consciousness through creation. This emphasis on the power of creativity to reach into the depths of being and transcend the world is a hallmark of Romanticism (Larmore Reference Larmore and Amerikas2000; Eagleton Reference Eagleton1983).

Murray and Morgan attempted to explore the apperceptive abilities of individuals with their Thematic Apperception Test, which was “a method of revealing to the trained interpreter some of the dominant drives, emotions, sentiments, complexes and conflicts of a personality” (Murray with Morgan Reference Murray and Morgan1943, 4). They believed the test was based on the supposedly well recognized fact that when someone attempts to interpret a complex social situation he is apt to tell as much about himself as about the situation. To “one with ‘double hearing’ . . . he is exposing certain inner forces and arrangements – wishes, fears and traces of past experience” (Murray with Morgan [1935] Reference Murray, Morgan and Shneidman1981, 390). The test was also based on the “fact” that “written fiction is the conscious or unconscious expression of the author's fantasies” (ibid., 390–391). They emphasized that the “future success” of the test hinged on the perfection of the interpreter with “double hearing,” since “TAT stories offer boundless opportunities for the projection of one's own complexes or one's pet theories” (Murray with Morgan Reference Murray and Morgan1943, 6).

For Murray and Morgan the TAT was an “effective means of disclosing a subject's preoccupations and some of the unconscious trends which underlie them” (Murray with Morgan [1935] Reference Murray, Morgan and Shneidman1981, 407). They believed it had advantages in that it was a simple and informal procedure which could be casually completed in two hours, or even in an hour in abbreviated form (ibid.). Its effectiveness was based on experimental subterfuge, since the subject was “led to believe that it is a test of creative imagination . . . unaware of the fact that he is revealing his innermost thoughts.” This was possible because his “attention is not on himself, and so in many instances he indirectly confesses to things which he would not be willing to mention directly” and thereby “exposes latent tendencies of the existence of which he is entirely unconscious” (ibid., 407–408). The test's “power to expose the underlying tendencies which the subject, or patient is not willing to admit, or can not admit because he is unconscious of them” entailed the value of the test for its creators especially since these tendencies were “the very opposite of what the subject consciously and voluntarily does and says in his daily life” (Murray with Morgan Reference Murray and Morgan1943, 4, 16). Interestingly, Francis Galton made a similar observation in an 1879 article on “Psychometric Experiments,” in which he wrote that the records for a word association would be very instructive as “they lay bare the foundations of a man's thoughts with curious distinctness, and exhibit his mental anatomy with more vividness and truth than he would probably care to publish to the world” (Galton Reference Galton1879).

For Murray and Morgan, this exposure was achieved by simply encouraging the subject or patient to “demonstrate his imaginative ability” by composing numerous narratives based on illustrations of ambiguous situations, which were believed to stir the imagination and “force the subject to deal . . . with certain classical human situations,” a process “designed to evoke imagery and fantasy” (Murray with Morgan Reference Murray and Morgan1943, 8, 4). This was not the first projective test that asked their subjects to tell stories based on cards with pictures and images. Such tests were created and administered by H. L. Brittain in 1907, Walter Libby in 1908, and Louis Schwartz in 1932. Interestingly, many of the Murray's and Morgan's images were taken from popular advertisements, and illustrations of serialized novels found in periodicals like Parents Magazine, Colliers, and the Saturday Evening Post (Morgan Reference Morgan, Gieser and Stein1999). A trained interpreter would then examine the “content of the stories, as well as their style and manner of composition,” which were believed to symbolically expose so much of the tendencies and complexes of the inner layers of a personality to a discerning interpreter that he would “hardly escape the feeling that he is prying” (Murray with Morgan Reference Murray and Morgan1943, 16). In short, the test was premised on the supposition that creative narratives have the power to reveal the deepest parts of a personality.

American Culture and the Second World War

Murray bemoaned the superficial culture of mid-twentieth-century America. It was a “cosmetic culture,” a “skin-deep” civilization where it paid “to be washed, shaved, manicured, deodorized, tailored,” where “the best epidermis” triumphed (Murray Reference Murray and Shneidman1940, 311). For Murray this superficiality was the “ideology of big-business,” and it had become well established in the universities. The “congenial fiction” that there “are no depths” had become a truth in academic psychology, and Murray did not think it was a coincidence “that the inventor of behaviorism found his destiny in the advertising business” (ibid.) Against all of this shallowness Murray trumpeted the corrective way of psychoanalysis.

The tension between the shallowness of American culture and the depths explored by his projective methods was complicated by Murray's yearning to involve himself in the Second World War. In the early 1940s Murray exhibited contempt for the young of the United States, which expressed a concern for his country and also an evasion of several awkward contradictions (Robinson Reference Robinson1992, 273). During his privileged life Murray had experienced no privations, hardships, or combat, yet he criticized the extreme timidity of young people, derided intellectuals, and was highly critical of the “Romantic Genius figure,” even as nearly all aspects of his life indicated a serious engagement with Romantic ideals (ibid., 273–274). As his biographer suggests, Murray “was as deeply uncertain about these bright, introverted, Romantic, peace-loving young intellectuals as he was about the large part of his own nature they mirrored back to him” (ibid.). Murray believed the attitude of the young was indicative of his generation's failure to lead and educate. Both the young college students at Harvard, and Murray himself, were quite critical of American culture, yet when it came to the war against the Axis powers Murray supported it fervently (ibid., 275). In a Boston Herald article Murray called for his readers to “be ‘high morale carriers’ in speech as well as in deed, to stare realities in the face, to support the government, to abstain from grumbling and criticism, to go into training, physically and morally, in order to be equal to the setbacks and deprivations that lie immediately ahead of us” (ibid., 276).

Like many other scientists of the time, Murray used the war as an opportunity for the pursuit of a position of authority, a pursuit in which he was desperately and doggedly engaged. Knowledge and understanding of the depths of personality certainly seemed to satisfy Murray, but during the war period what really moved him was “the hope that knowledge will lead eventually to power, to a more sagacious management of infant life, to fruitfulness and the self-development of finer men and women, to happier societies” (Murray [1940] Reference Murray and Shneidman1981, 291). While Murray's hope for finer people and managed societies might seem tinged with eugenic or utopian thinking, it is important to keep in mind that the alliance between psychological knowledge and power was almost axiomatic during much of the Second World War and part of the postwar era (Herman Reference Herman1995, 9). Given Murray's Romantic inclinations, his critical view of American culture, and his marginal place in psychology, his longing to participate in the war-effort may seem slightly contradictory, but one should not underestimate the opportunity such a large scale military conflict offered the marginalized psychologist to demonstrate the practical and public worth of his methods and theories. In his eagerness to participate, Murray was no longer a marginal figure – he was completely conventional.

His chance to realize his opportunity to contribute came in 1942 when General William Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services, called for a study of Hitler's personality in order to understand how Hitler influenced the German People, and to predict how he might react to defeat. Only too happy for the opportunity, Murray authored the confidential report, entitled, “Analysis of the Personality of Adoph [sic] Hitler: With Prediction of His Future Behavior and Suggestions for Dealing with Him Now and After Germany's Surrender.” Murray formulated his analysis by interpreting five different texts along with data supplied by the Office of Strategic Services (Murray Reference Murray1943, 3). In the report he wrote that the “analysis of the metaphors used in Mein Kampf has proved rewarding in the attempt to discover the underlying forces of his personality” (ibid., 2–3). In fact, Murray believed he had exposed Hitler's secret sexual need for passivity and abasement and the resulting masochism by “the systematic analysis of and correlation of the three-thousand odd metaphors he uses in Mein Kampf” (ibid., 7). According to Murray, Hitler's metaphors not only revealed repressed sexual desires, they also intoxicated masses of people. “Aristotle has said that the metaphor is the most potent force on earth,” Murray wrote, “and Hitler, master of the crude metaphor, has confirmed the dictum in this generation” (ibid.). Hitler's facility with language and other dimensions of his conduct convinced Murray that Hitler was “not entirely devoted to destruction,” but possessed “a deep valid strain of creativeness” and lived aspects of his life “as a Romantic artist does” (ibid., 17).

Some have suggested Murray's work was years ahead of what is generally considered now to be psychological profiling (Housden Reference Housden2005, 4). His work at Harvard had been devoted to capturing the entire personality of an individual, and his Explorations in Personality had become so important within the Britain's War Office Selection Board (WOSB) he was nearly commissioned as brigadier general in the British Army. But in 1943 the OSS asked Murray to help them create an assessment program for recruits in Washington D. C. He soon became a senior staff member at the secret station outside of Washington D. C. cryptically called “Station S” (Robinson Reference Robinson1992, 278). Along with running the evaluations at “Station S,” Murray also helped to set up other testing sites in California, Washington, and Maryland; evaluated OSS personnel in the field in France; and supervised the assessment of Chinese paratroopers for operations behind Japanese lines while in Kunming, China, just before the Japanese surrender (ibid., 283). Murray gloried in his wartime work; eventually he rose to the rank of Lt. Colonel and received the Legion of Merit (ibid.).

In creating an assessment program for spies to man the newly formed OSS, Murray employed many of the methods and ideas he used in Explorations, which had become, he claimed, a Bible for his British counterparts (ibid., 282). In evaluating candidates Murray and his colleagues subjected them to various methods of evaluation. Over the span of a few days recruits would be exposed to “the most elaborate and thorough procedures in the entire U.S. Military” (Herman Reference Herman1995, 44–45). This was due in part to the belief that those selected would be important to the war effort and that the assessment process warranted an enormous investment of expert time and attention; it was also due to Murray's student Donald MacKinnon's (the other major force of the OSS assessment staff) admission that “nobody knows who would make a good spy or an effective guerilla fighter,” which made the assessment and selection process all the more confusing (ibid.). This elaborate and thorough process included interviews, autobiographies, social and situational tests, improvisations, stress and fatigue tests, such as simulated enemy interrogations, as well as casual informal observations of behavior, such as a recruit's tolerance for alcohol, which were all recorded and considered (ibid.). The recruits were given a battery of intelligence tests and projective tests such as the Rorschach, the TAT, and the Sentence Completion (OSS Assessment Staff 1948, 38). OSS recruits, along with Chinese paratroopers, were all subjected to the TAT, and in Murray's view the interpretation of the test was an obstacle to including the test in the assessment program (ibid., 335). Despite this obstacle he felt a slightly modified version of the TAT gave an assessor “fruitful hypotheses and promising lines of approach in exploring each candidate's personality” (ibid., 336). This was one way to explore the unconscious of the potential spy, an exploration the recruit unwittingly endured via an interpretation of the fictional texts he produced. The popularity of the TAT should not be surprising since during the war Americans also used the Rorschach as “a standard entry exam for many kinds of service,” just as the Germans used it for racial settlement and annihilation (Galison Reference Galison and Daston2007, 290).

While in Kunming, China, Murray was horrified by the news he heard over his jeep's radio of the bombing of Hiroshima and claimed to be subsequently terrorized by a “hectic procession of horrendous images of the world's fate” (Murray [1967] Reference Murray and Shneidman1981, 74). For more than a decade Murray would abandon the work that he set out in his Explorations of Personality and pursued for the OSS, and devoted himself to what he called “the world's dilemma” (ibid.). After the war, while others focused on reducing tensions and “quieting the anxieties of their fellow citizens, Murr[ay] was oriented toward the total abolition of war” (ibid.). He became convinced that such a peace could only be reached “by a world government of an unprecedented type, which would never be established or never last without a radical transformation of ethnocentric sentiments and values” and “an unprecedented vision and conception of world relationship and fellowship, a kind of superordinate natural religion, or mythologized philosophy” (ibid.).

While Murray had lost interest in his methods for assessing and capturing the deep fundamental aspects of personality, his methods and brand of psychology were gaining widespread acceptance. The war required human management on a large scale. Psychologists offered themselves up to the challenge with vim and verve; in so doing, the distinction between unethical manipulation and an enlightened facilitation of the war effort often blurred and was sometimes altogether lost (Herman Reference Herman1995, 12). It was not only Murray who believed his methods were capable of revealing universal aspects of the unconscious of various personalities; most wartime psychologists also assumed that understanding individual behavior was equivalent to understanding collective behavior, and thereby made a significant contribution to some key features of the postwar United States (ibid.).

For his part Murray noticed that many of the psychoanalytic notions he adhered to “surreptitiously regained their lost respectability; and after World War II, Freudian theory in toto overran large areas of American psychology as Napoleon overran Europe” (ibid., 62). The views that had marginalized him at Harvard and that were “pretty generally tabooed in academic circles between 1926 and 1936 . . . [had] became popular commonplaces within a single generation, things to be taught in general education courses,” and Murray “found himself occupying a position of discomforting respectability” (ibid.). The ascension of psychology and psychoanalysis helps explain just how it is that the TAT and its Romantic vestiges remain with us today. Murray's way of doing psychology and his literary test became integrated into a wider postwar culture, in part because of Murray's and psychology's position and success in the War.

A Scientific Tool: The TAT's Life after Murray

Despite his renunciations of war and his abandonment of his own methods, military planners offered Murray's wartime work as a key scientific wartime contribution in personnel selection and psychological warfare in their testimony during the congressional hearings, which would eventually result in the founding of the National Science Foundation (Herman Reference Herman1995, 46). Donald MacKinnon institutionalized the OSS selection procedures at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research at the University of California and began to work toward “developing techniques to identify the personality characteristics which make for successful and happy adjustment to modern industrial society” (ibid.). The business segment of the modern industrial society was publicly considering Murray and MacKinnon's wartime work in the OSS as early as 1946. According to a Fortune magazine article, business leaders and the OSS operated on the same hunch, namely: that both intelligence agents and top business management required the rare quality of well-rounded competence (Staff Writer 1946, 92). They opined that to take a “reasonably accurate measure of a man for a job” it is not enough to know what a man believes, thinks, loves, and hates; an assessor must also learn “his hidden fears, anxieties, and longings; what goes on in the private world of his unconscious where part of the past, present, and future could be read, if the language were only understood” (ibid.). Of course this language could be partially understood by “the almost prophetic insight of Harry Murray, a unique combination of thinking machine, dreamer, two-fisted drinker, and scientist, whose inner-driving force suggests a band of Scotch Presbyterians rising from their knees to do the will of God,” and his “most ingenious” test, the TAT (ibid., 93, 217).

Though ignored and discounted by some, years after its creation, the TAT continues to be used widely in assessing personality. This is largely due to David McClelland's efforts to make the TAT into “an objective measure” to be used in research (Winter Reference Winter1998, 146). McClelland believed that if something existed it could be measured. In his words, “If the Oedipus complex exists, you should be able to identify it and code it, and recognize it when you see it in the TAT” (ibid., 136). McClelland was convinced of the existence of unconscious motives by early observations of members of his father's church, stating “I never believe what people said about their motives, because what they said on Sunday was clearly not what they said on Monday. . . . So I was quite ready for [the concept of] ‘unconscious motives’” (ibid., 135). McClelland also accepted Murray's contention that unconscious motives were the key to understanding the nature of people and possibly even human civilization. McClelland held that the TAT was a more “systematic way of collecting the fantasies in the daytime than Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and their followers collected from night-time dreams” (McClelland Reference McClelland, Gieser and Stein1999, 163). McClelland not only accepted these notions, he wanted to prove that Murray was right – that our motives are key and often unconscious determinants of behavior and that they are uniquely measurable with the TAT (ibid., 164).

McClelland attempted to extend the TAT to various disciplines throughout his career. He believed that the idea behind the TAT was so powerful for gaining insights into human nature that it would create new interest in the psychology of mental content, and would provide “new avenues for contributions psychology can make to economics and business, history, political science and international relations, and cultural anthropology and sociology” (ibid., 173). He also believed that the TAT was clinically capable of successfully changing personality characteristics such as motives and competencies (ibid.). In all of McClelland's extensions of the TAT, “the insistence that spontaneous, imaginative thought when analyzed for content can provide psychological information that goes far beyond what is obtained from self-edited conscious reports” explicitly remained the test's basic epistemological starting point (ibid.).

In his initial work with the TAT, McClelland set out to experimentally study motives, starting with hunger and its effects on behaviors such as self-reports of hunger or thematic apperception stories. He found “that only the TAT yielded unique effects (content shifts in the stories) that increased in linear fashion with increasing hours of food deprivation in men who were not aware that their hunger drive was being studied” (ibid., 164). But McClelland parted ways with Murray in measuring unconscious motives: he felt the interpretation of expert and experienced interpreters, which Murray advocated, introduced bias and social judgments (ibid., 164–165). McClelland wanted a pure measure of the unique effects of a motive and developed coding systems for these effects that yielded high inter-judge agreement (ibid., 165). McClelland said that he and his colleagues spent endless hours discussing, refining, and recoding coding schemes (Winter Reference Winter1998, 143).

He believed that he had removed the bias of the interpreters by strictly scoring and coding the presence, absence, and frequency of effects of the motives aroused in the test's stories (McClelland Reference McClelland, Gieser and Stein1999, 165). McClelland's scoring scale was a series of categories scored as either present or absent, which reflected the “assumption that extensivity (scoring many subcategories) is the equivalent of intensity (a very strong motive) and were defended on the grounds of scientific objectivity” (Winter Reference Winter1998, 144). For him the TAT interpreter combines many unknown factors in his or her judgments, but no matter how precise their judgment it is practically useless in the development of basic science, whereas counted frequencies at least yielded some objective measure (ibid.). According to McClelland, Murray was not happy with what McClelland called his “experimentally derived scoring systems,” maintaining that interpretation should be based on the opinions of experts (McClelland Reference McClelland, Gieser and Stein1999, 165).

After making sure that the TAT was what he believed to be a scientific instrument, McClelland did not stop with hunger; he also sought to discover themes which characterized aspects of the human condition – themes that appear in popular myths (ibid., 168). He cited the study of TAT fantasies of women dying from cancer as “evidence for the existence of a complex named for Persephone, who was carried off underground by her demon lover, Hades, and finally escaped to bring joy to the earth in a life-enhancing way” (ibid.). For McClelland this study demonstrated that “women threatened with death wrote stories more often about being carried away by an illicit ‘underground’ male lover than did women who were hospitalized for other reasons,” and he believed that this was a theme which “appeared consistently throughout popular Western literature and drama starting with Greece through the Middle Ages to the present in a form that he called the “Harlequin complex” (ibid.). McClelland also endorsed an expanded form of the TAT as it appeared in the work of D. P. McAdams, who had “dramatically used the thematic potential of the TAT to develop a whole new approach to personality study” (ibid., 168–169). McAdams's book, Stories We Live By, treated a person's life story as if it were a large and continuing TAT story, which he analyzed in terms of various themes “based on ‘images’ drawn from history or mythology”; these themes were believed to ultimately “account for much of what the person thinks, says, feels, and does” (ibid.). McClelland seemed to relish that the TAT approach lived on in such literally expanded form.

Not only could TAT-type approaches identify complexes of the human condition and themes that animate an individual's life, McClelland also held that they could potentially give some insight into various themes of a culture if they were applied to the culture's popular literature (ibid., 169). He thought his TAT coding system could be applied to cultural and historical documents which might very well open up a whole new area of research (ibid.). By examining the imaginative stories of children, which possessed a “TAT-like quality,” an observer would be able “to find key cultural themes, which account for the culture's unique characteristics” (ibid., 170). These TAT applications were important for McClelland, as they would allow for “the study of culture at a distance from mythology, popular literature.” In addition, it was “much less labor intensive” than other methods “for explaining key characteristics of a culture” (ibid.).

McClelland was hired by the United States Navy in the 1970s in an effort to help it improve race relations by evaluating their most successful race relations consultants (ibid.). He saw his role as similar to Murray's in setting up the OSS assessment program, but he chose not to use the OSS methods, deciding instead on an open-ended approach in which he designed an interview procedure modeled closely after the TAT (ibid., 171). The interview was called the “Behavioral Event Interview” and it “formed the basis of dozens of similar studies designed to determine the competencies associated with success in a variety of managerial or leadership positions” (ibid., 171–172). Predictably his interview was used by various business organizations. He pointed to the success of the interview in one such business where it “consistently identified the competencies associated with managerial success, provided a basis for feedback to executives to help them approach their jobs better, cut executive turnover thus saving far more money than the system cost, and provided a method of selecting new hires who would perform more successfully on the first year on the job” (ibid.).

The efficiency and predictive power his interview brought to business pleased McClelland, but Murray disapproved of many of McClelland's postwar extensions of the TAT. He did not believe McClelland should use the test “to number-crunch conclusions about people (‘you can't make these big groupings’, he warned)”; but McClelland had little interest in Murray's warning (Lemov Reference Lemov2009, 51). He did, however, acknowledge that many of his extensions of the TAT surprised or possibly even upset Murray. Murray believed that McClelland was, in many ways, beholden to the superficial world of surfaces and corporate America that Murray so despised (McClelland Reference McClelland, Gieser and Stein1999, 172–173). Murray had also lost control of his creation. He often complained that McClelland did not speak with him enough, as McClelland recalls, so he “used to offer, jokingly, to pay me for my time because money was what interested achievement-oriented people like me” (ibid.).

McClelland was not the only proponent of the TAT. It also featured prominently in a well known theoretical investigation of anti-Semitism produced by the Frankfurt school called The Authoritarian Personality (Herman Reference Herman1995, 58–60). The book was informed by wartime psychological studies of emotions, authority, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, and relied on questionnaires, interviews, and projective tests such as the TAT. Using these methods the work proposed that authoritarianism was based in the rigidly structured depths of the unconscious personalities of individuals. Projective tests played an important role in postwar social scientific research as well. A generation of anthropologists and social scientists looked to psychology and tests like the TAT as the primary tools for cross-cultural research (ibid., 139). After the war the TAT along with other tests spread into ethnographic endeavors abroad (Lemov Reference Lemov2009, 50).

Interpreting the TAT's Narrative Today

Contemporary advocates of the TAT claim that it has proved “eminently flexible and adaptable to a variety of clinical and research purposes,” and is thus here to stay (Gieser and Stein Reference Gieser, Stein, Gieser and Stein1999, 218–219). They point to the test's use in “neuropsychology, forensics, and cross-cultural study” as well as “longitudinal research” using the TAT that is still “conducted at the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Henry A. Murray Research [Archive at Harvard University] and the University of Michigan” (ibid., 215, 218). The TAT's extraordinary flexibility is due to what advocates believe is the test's “transtheoretical capacity” to elicit psychological information beyond the information gathered by interviews, tests and questionnaires (ibid., 216). Proponents claim that it is no longer necessary to subscribe to Murray's methods and theories, nor is it necessary to be an adherent of psychoanalysis.

There are two premises common to all the uses and forms of the TAT covered above. The first is the focus on narrative and its ability to penetrate beyond the conscious, empirical world. This putative ability renders it, in the eyes of many, a “transtheoretical” scientific research tool. The second premise is that there exists something basic and elemental beyond an individual's conscious thoughts and feeling that resembles the psychoanalytic unconscious. In critically considering the notion of narrative interpretation that Murray's TAT entailed, it is not difficult to see it as a sort of reductive rewriting of the rich, multiple realities of everyday experience into Murray's constrained terms provided by the strategically limited psychoanalytic view of the mind (Jameson Reference Jameson1981, 22). In other words, Murray's TAT is a process which takes one narrative and rewrites it into the paradigm of another narrative, which is taken to be a sort of “master code or Ur-narrative and proposed as the ultimate hidden or unconscious meaning of the first one” (ibid.). For early Romantic figures like Novalis and Schlegel, knowledge was mediated by cyphers, metaphors, and other symbolic figures (Black Reference Black and Brown2000a, 118). Schopenhauer envisioned the world as a “cryptograph,’’ and viewed the human psyche skeptically, somewhat akin to Freud (Gardner Reference Gardner and Baldwin2003, 111). This heritage is reflected in psychoanalytic interpretation of just these kinds of mediating, symbolic, emotive figures and metaphors.

Murray used narrative interpretation as one aspect of his OSS work to crack the code of the human psyche in order to assess and predict the success of individuals who were to rely on subterfuge and duplicity to be successful. Business was quick to follow Murray's lead in the OSS. The TAT's standing in business was strengthened by McClelland's supposed standardization of the TAT which he believed had made it a mobile, objective research tool. McClelland achieved such standardization by “coding” the frequency of responses to motivate arousal in an individual's narrative. McClelland wanted to remove the subjective biases involved in the decoding work of expert interpretation by essentially recoding what were believed to be coded narratives into quantifiable measures. This coding system made a form of the TAT exportable to concerns beyond those envisioned by Murray, from the sexual fantasies of dying women to the unique characteristics of culture.

If we suppose that narrative possesses the power that the TAT attributes to it, then the TAT entails a calculated abuse of the individuals tested, based on their inability to interpret their own narrative. An individual's mind is forced to victimize itself by producing a narrative it believes it understands, while the test requires that the conscious mind altogether fails to decipher and understand the coded meaning that it reveals. For Murray this was just as it should be since the “psychologist is and will always be the final judge of all questions pertaining to personality” (Murray et al. Reference Murray1938, 27). While this may seem cavalier, it stems from the seemingly more reasonable belief that a literary text may serve as a proxy for an author's deepest self. While McClelland's subjection of an individual's narrative to a carefully coded “experimentally derived scoring system” may seem more “scientific,” it should be kept in mind that this was done without ever questioning the power of narrative to go beyond an individual's conscious mental life.

This unquestioned power of narrative brings to the fore the second aspect common to uses of the TAT, which is the assumption that there is something beyond consciousness closely resembling a psychoanalytic unconscious, which has clear German precedents in the thought of Leibniz, Schelling, Goethe, and Carl Gustav Carus. While the notion of the unconscious was no stranger to pre-Freudian psychology, the hermeneutic practice of Freud's psychoanalysis, amplified in Jung, drew on conceptions of the unconscious wider than those found in science and philosophy. The poet and mining engineer Novalis provided the mining motif of a “deep structure” for the unconscious, which was reinforced by Eduard Von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious, a work whose popularity was due to a very keen renewed interest in the thought of Schopenhauer (Gardener Reference Gardner and Baldwin2003, 107–108). Schopenhauer outlined “the limited scope of consciousness, the subservience of consciousness and cognition to the will, the fallibility of self-knowledge, the existence of repression, the aetiology of madness, and the importance of sexuality,” all of which would be taken up by Freud in some form (ibid., 111). Nietzsche was influenced by Schopenhauer and had read Von Hartmann's revision of Schopenhauer (Liebscher Reference Liebscher, Nicholls and Liebscher2010, 245–246), and Freud directly dealt with both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in his psychoanalytic work (Gödde Reference Gödde, Nicholls and Liebscher2010, 282–286).

Murray's original, marginalized place in American psychology exemplifies the status granted to American psychoanalysis in the first three or four decades of the twentieth century, while his ascent in the Second World War, along with the popularity of the TAT thereafter, mirrors the spread of “Freudian Universalism,” or “the hypothesis that Freud's theories were able to account for the operations of every example of the human psyche” (Lemov Reference Lemov2009, 49). The prevalence of the TAT also signals a self from the nineteenth-century that insists “on relations of depth and surface, inner and outer life, and the inseparability of ideation and effect” (Galison Reference Galison and Daston2007, 277). This self fit nicely with American society's increasing interest in the hidden mental lives and motivations of Americans and of foreign people. The increasing importance of narrative as a key to understanding the self seems to be a little acknowledged continuation of this trend. Modern proponents of the TAT believe that stories constitute lives, which give meaning to lived experiences, and so the TAT supposedly gets right at “the heart of our humanity” because humanity is built around storytelling and narrative (Gieser and Stein Reference Gieser, Stein, Gieser and Stein1999, 215) – a notion that would have doubtless appealed to Henry Murray.