Card pull in projective testing

Card pull, the tendency of the test stimuli to evoke or predispose certain cognitive and affective responses in the subject, is essential to the understanding and practice of projective testing. The basic instruction in projective testing employs the subjunctive mood to catalyze the dialectic between actuality and potentiality inherent in the projective stimulus. The subject is encouraged to play with the stimulus, to modify fact, to forsake the literal and the concrete, and to toy with the reality-stuff of the stimulus. Various conceptions of projective stimuli are reviewed and considered nondefinitive of projective testing. Projective testing is tentatively defined as a state of mind, a temporary but adaptive collusion shared between tester and subject which involves the former inviting the latter to modify a sample of reality.