INTRODUCTION

This manual is designed to facilitate scoring thematic apperceptive stories, or other imaginative verbal productions for a sequence of stances toward the environment. The scoring system was empirically derived as a measure of the psychological, or fantasy, characteristics of individuals who show behavioral evidence of preoccupation with the issues associated with the Freudian oral, anal, phallic, and genital psychosexual stages. The initial effort was to determine whether behavior that is conventionally recognized as indicative of these stage issues was associated with fantasy preoccupations that were predictable from Freudian theory in normal adults.

Derivation

Behavioral criteria for classifying individuals as oral, anal, phallic, or genital were selected. An individual was required to exhibit all of the criterion behaviors for one stage, and no more than one for any other. The behaviors were all chosen to be closely related to the Freudian zonal definitions of the sources of stage-related feelings and fantasies. That is, we chose to limit ourselves to strictly defined zone-related behavior. In a few cases we were unable to be quite so stringent, but in all cases we chose behaviors that even a superficial understanding of the Freudian stages would cause to be classified under one stage rather than another.