![]() “What had started as an experiment looked to be in fact a test.”įor it to be a test, he had to standardize his blots. “People’s answers started to reveal more than Rorschach had thought possible: higher or lower intelligence, character and personality, thought disorders and other psychological problems,” Searls writes. Archiv und Sammlung Hermann Rorschach, University Library of Bern Swiss psychiatrist and test inventor Hermann Rorschach. “The images hovered between meaninglessness and meaning, right on the borderline between all too obvious and not obvious enough,” writes Searls. Rorschach started showing his own blots, drawn with fountain pen on white paper, to his patients at Munsterlingen Clinic in Switzerland. But no one had yet standardized these tests or scored them. Other clinicians had employed “blotograms” to measure imagination, especially in children. It seems inevitable that inkblots would follow. One drawing of an onion dome with smoke rising from nearby smokestacks was marked up with Rorschach’s note: “A cookie? A mountain? A cloud?” His interest in the art movement Futurism sparked further interest into “how closely psychological explorations could be tied to art,” writes Searls. His notes from then are filled with sketches of patients and charcoal drawings. Rorschach came of age as a doctor during an “orgy of testing” at the university, where psychiatrists spent hours “stop-watching, dream-interpreting and psychoanalyzing their patients.” ‘What had started as an experiment looked to be in fact a test.’ “Psychiatrists tried to cure cases of demonic possession.” Before Freud, psychiatry’s methods “largely coincided with religious teachings about virtue, sin, character and self-restraint,” writes Searls. It was a time when everything seemed to change overnight with the arrival of Sigmund Freud. From Bleuler he learned compassion for his patients, and from Jung he discovered the importance of open-ended questions to access the unconscious mind. His passion for art continued during training as a psychiatrist at the University of Zurich, where he learned from Carl Jung and Eugen Bleuler. Born in 1884, he expressed an interest in the arts from a young age (his childhood nickname was “Klex,” a German word for “inkblot”). It all starts with a hunky Swiss psychiatrist named Hermann Rorschach. ![]() So how did these ink stains earn our trust and so deeply enter into the American psyche? They are open-ended responses admissible in court and used by therapists, teachers and job interviewers, despite heated controversy about their legitimacy. ![]() Writer and translator Damion Searls has the answer for us in his rich and engaging new book, “The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing,” which dives into the history of the test - knowledge that may help us stop mangling our Rorschach metaphors.Ĭhances are you have encountered the 10 inkblots, carefully designed images that have remained the same since their introduction in 1921. Two weeks ago ESPN called Tom Brady “a Rorschach test in shoulder pads.” But what is a Rorschach test, exactly? Add Brexit, Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, and the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel “American Pastoral” to the list. Barack Obama called himself a “human Rorschach test” during his 2008 presidential campaign. Bernie Sanders have also been called Rorschach tests. The label stuck - everything from her campaign to her “no-makeup face” has been described similarly. “I am a Rorschach test,” Hillary Clinton told Esquire magazine in 1993.
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