Thematic apperceptive measurement of motivation now has a solid conceptual foundation, something it lacked when David McClelland led the vanguard in establishing its validity (McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, & Lowell, 1953). A new theory of motivation (Atkinson & Birch, 1970, 1974, 1978) has overcome the conceptual limitations of both statistical test theory and traditional motivational theories by emphasizing the temporal continuity of behavior and its underlying motivational structure. I will show how old puzzles about thematic apperception have been resolved and the old vision of its promise reawakened by reconsidering the method within the new theoretical framework.

Skepticism about the scientific worth of this projective method has been sustained by two arguments. One is the criticism that the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) n Achievement (need for achievement) score lacks acceptable reliability when one considers the lack of internal consistency among scores obtained from one story and the next in the set from which an individual's total n Achievement score is obtained (Entwisle, 1972). Reliability is considered the sine qua non of validity according to the presumptions of test theory. The other argument derives from the inherent complexity of the relationship between the strength of a motive and its behavioral expression, something about which we became very much aware in the course of developing the theory of achievement motivation (Atkinson & Feather, 1966; Atkinson & Raynor, 1974, 1978).