The Inkblots

Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing Damion Searls Simon & Schuster UK Pb, 416pp, illus, bib, ind, £20.00

Part biography, part cultural history, The Inkblots is a thorough, if somewhat pedantic, look at Hermann Rorschach’s famous “inkblots” – 10 cards, the same then as now, consisting of symmetrical, abstract swirls of ink, a marriage of art and science meant to unlock the viewer’s unconscious, and designed, Searls observes, to “get around your defenses and conscious strategies of self-presentation”. This approach was once considered revolutionary, yet is now largely viewed as pseudoscience. The outré has become cliché, a psychological test uniquely without consistent criteria or results.

Hermann Rorschach, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud and a student of Carl Jung and Eugen Bleuler, developed his psychological “experiment” while working among the patients of a Swiss insane asylum. Interestingly, he considered it not as a test but rather, in Damion Searls’s description, as “a nonjudgmental and open-ended investigation into people’s ways of seeing”. An amateur artist and the son of an art teacher, Rorschach introduced into modern psychology concepts originating in Renaissance Europe more readily associated with art interpretation, developing the inkblots as a means of determining whether his patients’ unique perceptions of these forms might illuminate the nature of their pathologies.

At first, those with severe mental disorders, such as schizophrenia or manic depression, interpreted the blots differently from the “normal” controls. Stirred by these early successes and pressured into adapting his experiment into a more generalised aptitude test, Rorschach retrospectively developed a theoretical basis, with a vague and complex scoring system, for his experimental methodology. Unfortunately, he died when he was only 37 without having provided a convincing demonstration of how the inkblots worked. Despite its unclear system and unverifiable results, the Rorschach Test became widespread among therapists in both its use and applicability, from employment applications to classroom, military and courtroom settings, and from custody battles to the Nuremberg trials.

The test reached the height of its popularity in the 1960s (Searls estimates that during this decade the inkblots were used a million times a year) before its reputation began to decline. While some psychologists continue to use the inkblots to detect mental disorders, its non-reproducibility, objectivity and reliability as a scientific method make it inconclusive. Though Searls at first hesitates to draw any conclusions concerning the test’s accuracy, he suggests that the inkblots work no better than chance, implying that psychology as a scientific method works better through inference and intuition, and that, unlike the physical sciences, replication in itself is not the ultimate criterion of any given psychological method’s success. Perhaps this most recognisable form of pop psychology works better as metaphor than science, thus lending itself to repeated cultural depictions in literature and film, from Andy Warhol to Alan Moore to Jay Z.

In the end, Searls’ biography/ cultural history, despite its meticulousness, is something of a missed opportunity; Searls, a novelist and translator of Döblin, Rilke, Gide and others, seems attracted to the notion of æsthetics as a means of unlocking the recesses of the human mind. He regrettably focuses on the test’s methodology and the infighting among its practitioners during what was, at the time, an infant science. He largely ignores the impact of the test on its subjects, much as Rorschach himself placed more credibility on his interpretations of results than the experiences of his patients.

There are important lessons to be drawn from the somewhat fascistic tendency among psychologists and social scientists to focus on safer, more predictable, generalised psychological systems than on the more mercurial and unpredictable individuated realm of the human mind, thereby forcing individuals to fit into neat concepts as opposed to developing methodologies elastic enough to respond to highly differentiated and unique mental disorders. In this sense, the inkblots are emblematic of an era that prized personality tests as a tool of conformism and social design, a kind of psychological Levittown.