The Inkblots by Damion Searls
The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test and the Power of Seeing by Damion Searls Simon and Schuster £20
You are presented with ten cards, each exhibiting a differently shaped, variously coloured, symmetrical ink blot, and asked ‘What is that?’ or ‘What might that be?’ This, the Rorschach Test, is the visual equivalent of Freud’s free-association procedure, which requires you to say whatever occurs to you when reading or hearing certain words. Whereas everyone connects ‘Freud’ to a vast array of psychological practices and theories, to most people ‘Rorschach’ only conjures up ink blots. Few know about the Swiss-german psychologist who invented them.
Partly this is because Hermann Rorschach died three years after he began experimenting with the test, and only a year after the publication of his book on it, Psychodiagnostics, in 1922. But, despite stalwart attempts by his biographer, the journalist and translator Damion Searls, to put him on a par with Freud and Jung, Rorschach comes across as vacillating and unambitious, lacking passion even about his own test, and perhaps too mild ever to have achieved greatness, however long he’d lived. Photographs of him show a selfconscious, diffident man, whose handsomeness is almost rendered unattractive by weakness and self-doubt. A dutiful elder brother to his orphaned siblings, whom he also supported financially, Rorschach was inspired to become a doctor by his father’s depression-driven death (‘I want to know whether it wouldn’t have been possible to help Father’), but was also tempted to study drawing. Judging by the paintings reproduced in this book, he made the right decision. He entered medical school in Zurich in 1904 and studied under the brilliant psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, inventor of the term, ‘schizophrenia’.
A feminist and Russophile, Rorschach fell in love with a spirited Russian fellow-student, Olga Stempelin, and became a devoted husband and father in a difficult marriage. After working at an asylum in Switzerland, and briefly
in a private clinic just outside Moscow, he ultimately became assistant director of a Swiss psychiatric hospital for the last seven years of his life.
Rorschach was intuitive and skilful as a doctor, practising what would now be called art and drama therapy. He borrowed a monkey from a troupe of travelling players, so as to elicit responses from passive and hostile patients. He began to develop his ink blots in 1918, but was unsure what he was looking for in the answers of those looking at them. Were the criteria for assessment only aesthetic, he wondered, and inevitably too dependent on the assessor’s own taste. He realised the need for clinical trials with a mentally healthy control group, but Searls is unclear about whether he ran them.
Two years after Rorschach’s death, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst David Mordecai Levy started using the Rorschach Test in his private Chicago practice. By 1937, it was being used to appraise students at Sarah Lawrence, an elite women’s college near New York. Assessment had been made more systematic, and already, promisingly, the split statutory to any new movement had occurred: Rorschach’s American disciples were divided into two bitterly feuding factions.
Between 1940 and 1945, the test was administered to twelve million American soldiers and marines (with an extremely hush-hush assessment system). But it was not popular with generals. When, in 1941, there was a Rorschach study of the poor over-anthropologised Samoans, they gave a statistically excessive number of ‘pure Colour responses’, which required virtually all of them to be classified as extrovert.
Uncertainty as to how to assess Rorschach subjects, and what exactly they were being assessed for, came to a climax when the test was administered to Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. Although most of them were ‘revealed’ to lack introspection and obey orders unthinkingly, some rated average or ‘particularly well adjusted’. Hjalmar Schacht, the Reich’s minister of economics, was, apparently, ‘an exceptionally well-integrated personality with excellent potential’. The Nuremberg results were suppressed. When, in 1975, they were re-analysed anonymously, with non-nazi results as controls, once again, instead of uncovering startling and startlingly distinctive monstrosity, the Nazis’ results seemed normal, or only abnormal in standard ways, with no ‘underlying common denominator’. This, says Searls, dealt the test ‘a devastating blow’.
Searls’s account of Rorschach is touching and intriguing, but, as the title of the last chapter has it, ‘the Rorschach Test is not a Rorschach Test’. By now it is more often a metaphor than a literally practised clinical procedure and, even if unintentionally, this biography shows us why. To order from Wordery for £12.58 incl p&p, go to http://www.theoldie. co.uk/books