The purpose of this study is to investigate the manner and extent to which certain behavioral dynamics of personality development are revealed in the responses of preschool children to the pictures of the Children's Apperception Test, hereafter referred to as the CAT. The CAT, a picturestory projective technique devised by Bellak and Bellak (2, 3), consists of a series of ten achromatic drawings depicting animals in various situations. The authors of the CAT report the following: It is to be used with children of both sexes primarily between the ages of three and ten for maximal usefulness.... The CAT was designed to facilitate understanding of a child's relationship to his most important figures and drives. The pictures were designed with the hope of eliciting responses to: feeding problems specifically, and oral problems generally; to problems of sibling rivalry; to illuminate the attitude toward parental figures and the way in which these figures are apperceived; to learn about the child's relationship to the parents as a couple -technically spoken of as the oedipal complex and, its culmination in the primal scene: namely, the child's fantasies about seeing the parents in bed together. Related to this, we wish to elicit the child's fantasies around aggression: acceptance by the adult world, and its fear of being lonely at night with a possible relation to masturbation, toilet behavior and the parents' response to it. We wish to learn about the child's structure and his dynamic method of reaction to-and handling of-its problems of growth (2, p. 1 if). The CAT was released on the basis of 200 records of children between the ages of three and ten. The size and nature of that portion of the sample under six and one-half years was not reported. Unpublished studies and