The test of time
One evening in late March 1922, Hermann Rorschach and his wife attended a staging of Henrik Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt.” “The next morning,” Damion Searls writes in “The Inkblots,” his fine and thorough new biography, “he woke up with stomach pain and a slight fever.” A week later, the creator of perhaps the most famous personality test of all time was dead.
Rorschach’s appendix had ruptured, ending his life at just 37 years. But that was all the gifted and deeply empathetic psychiatrist needed to achieve a certain kind of immortality. “Despite decades of controversy,” Searls writes, “the Rorschach test today is admissible in court, reimbursed by medical insurance companies, and administered around the world in job evaluations, custody battles, and psychiatric clinics.”
It’s also, Searls points out, a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Ray Bradbury’s “The Man in the Rorschach Shirt,” for example, first appeared in Playboy in 1966. Andy Warhol unveiled his painting “Rorschach” in 1984, which would later grace the cover of Jay Z’s 2010 memoir, “Decoded.” And it was in a 1993 interview with Esquire, Searls reminds us, that Hillary Clinton first referred to herself as a Rorschach test, “an image that would stay with her for years.” The list goes on.
Such sustained ubiquity, Searls believes, calls for a book like “The Inkblots,” an exhaustively researched story of Rorschach’s brief life and an engaging consideration of his enduring test. “No single instance of the Rorschach in everyday life requires any explanation,” writes Searls. “But its lasting presence in our collective imagination does.”
Hermann Rorschach was born in Zurich in November 1884. His “kindhearted” father, Ulrich, was a painter and art teacher who was “genuinely liked among colleagues and students.” His “warm and energetic” mother, Philippine, “liked to entertain her children with old folk songs.” Hermann had one younger sister, Anna, and a younger brother, Paul. (The Rorschachs lost their first-born child, Klara, at just 6 weeks.)
Before Hermann was 2, the family moved to Schaffhausen, a small city north of Zurich where they enjoyed a charming life in an alpine setting until Philippine succumbed to diabetes when Hermann was 12. Ulrich remarried about a year later, but he soon developed a neurological disease, likely from overexposure to lead paint. Horribly depressed for the remainder of his life, Ulrich died when Hermann was 18.
According to Searls, the loss inspired young Rorschach’s career in mental health. “I want to know if it wouldn’t have been possible to help Father,” he once told his sister. “What I want is to work at a madhouse. That is no reason not to get complete training as a doctor, but the most interesting thing in nature is the human soul, and the greatest thing a person can do is to heal these souls, sick souls.”
The inkblot test was his greatest attempt to seize that opportunity. Perfected sometime around 1918, it comprises 10 cards, each bearing a bilaterally symmetrical inkblot across a vertical center line. Subjects are shown each card, one-byone, in a particular sequence and asked to answer a simple question: What is this? The idea, Searls explains, is to reveal what you see — your perception — rather than what you imagine you could or should see.
Over time, as the test found its way into the world’s clinics, academic halls, health systems and courtrooms — including those at Nuremberg, where Göring thought it was a delight — the Rorschach has proven to be both insightful and extremely contentious. After reigning for years as one of the most frequently used personality tests in the U.S., today, according to Searls, it’s less popular, due in part to criticism and the rise of other tests, like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI.
“The Rorschach had become, after Freud, a symbol for everything people didn’t like about psychotherapy,” Searls writes, “too much unprovable inference, too much room for bias, not enough hard science.”
“The Inkblots” is tremendously rich. A Guggenheim and NEA fellow who specializes in translating Western European literature into English, the author probed unpublished letters, journals and other material to illuminate the way setting and circumstance influenced Rorschach’s life and work. Readers less enthusiastic about the clinical aspects of psychology and psychiatry may find themselves skimming certain sections, but such attention to detail also gives “The Inkblots” repeated moments of levity.
One of the most charming arrives early in the book. Nicknames, Searls tells us, were an “important part of life in German and Swiss fraternities” during Rorschach’s time at school, where he had already built a reputation for himself as someone who “drew quickly and well.” He was thus nicknamed accordingly. Rorschach’s friends, Searls tells us, called him “Klex,” the German word for “inkblot.”