History

Key milestones since 1967

The Institute for Projective Sciences has maintained an unbroken record of methodological research and standards development since its founding. The timeline below traces the principal milestones in the Institute's history, from the establishment of its founding charter through to its present governance under the Committee on Succession.

Key Milestones

• 1967 Founded. Prof. Alistair W. Croft appointed Founding Chair. The Institute is registered as a charitable trust under Swiss law, with its seat in Zürich. The founding charter establishes the Institute’s permanent mandate: the development and maintenance of rigorous standards for projective assessment methodology.
• 1967–1973 Development of the Standard Perceptual Reference Set (SPRS). The SPRS was the Institute’s first major methodological contribution: a standardised library of projective stimuli with documented administration protocols, response coding conventions, and normative data drawn from clinical and non-clinical populations. It remains the foundational reference for the Institute’s classification work.
• 1972 Dr. Helena M. Voss appointed Vice-Chair. Dr. Voss, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Perceptual Studies, Zürich, commenced work on the Full Inkblot Matrix (FIM), a comprehensive classification system for projective response patterns. Her tenure as Vice-Chair would span more than two decades.
• 1973–1977 FIM-800 classification. Under Dr. Voss’s direction, 800 inkblot stimuli were systematically classified across 47 response dimensions, producing the most detailed taxonomy of projective responding ever constructed. Dr. Voss’s field notebooks from this period are held in the Institute’s archive. They are designated as not available for viewing.
• 1975 Prof. Richard S. Taneja joins the Institute. Prof. Taneja, of the University of Chicago’s Department of Psychometric Method, commenced a programme of cross-population response variance research, examining how projective classification patterns differ across demographic groups. His work would later inform the development of distributional parity frameworks in third-party assessment certification.
• 1985 Prof. Judith K. Alpern joins the Institute. Prof. Alpern, of Stanford University’s Department of Cognitive Science, initiated research on response latency and semantic categorisation, expanding the Institute’s methodological scope beyond classification content to the temporal and linguistic dimensions of projective responding.
• 1989 Prof. Taneja succeeds Prof. Croft as Chair. Following the conclusion of Prof. Croft’s twenty-two-year tenure as Chair, Prof. Taneja assumed the role. Dr. Voss continued as Vice-Chair.
• 1995 Dr. Voss concludes her tenure as Vice-Chair. After twenty-three years in the role, Dr. Voss stepped down as Vice-Chair. The Vice-Chair position remained vacant until 2001.
• 2001 Prof. Alpern appointed Vice-Chair; Prof. Taneja concludes his tenure as Chair. Prof. Alpern assumed the Vice-Chair role vacated by Dr. Voss six years earlier. Prof. Taneja concluded his twelve-year tenure as Chair.
• 1990–1999 Non-clinical applications explored. The Institute’s Chair and Vice-Chair considered proposals to apply the FIM-800 classification framework to non-clinical domains, including natural formation taxonomy, temporal memory patterns, and social signal analysis. These discussions were documented in internal memoranda but no formal research programme was approved. The consideration itself is recorded in the Institute’s archive.
• 2005–2012 Active research programme concludes. The Institute began winding down its active research operations. In 2012, the Archive of Perceptual Response Data was formally sealed: no new response protocols have been accepted since that date. The closure of the active research programme coincided with the emergence of independent efforts to apply projective classification in non-clinical contexts.
• 2019–present Governance under the Committee on Succession. Dr. Cordelia March joined the Institute in 2019 and was voted into the role of Director of Research Integrity by the membership. The Institute operates with limited administrative capacity under the governance of the Committee on Succession, comprising members drawn from the academic community. Further details on governance →