Rorschach’s inkblot test– and the Nazis

The bizarre tale of how Rorschach’s inkblot psychological test became a worldwide phenomenon – and even sparked a bitter battle for supremacy between prominent Nazis on trial at Nuremberg

In the aftermath of World War II, the 24 most prominent surviving Nazis awaiting trial at Nuremberg were assessed by a psychiatrist called Douglas Kelley. Over a period of five months, Kelley would visit them daily, talking to them at length, often for three or four hours at a time. He had, he said, never had such an easy lot of patients to interview. For the most part, they were bored and tense, and welcomed the chance to talk about themselves.

They also relished taking part in all sorts of tests. Given IQ tests, they became very competitive, determined to outdo each other. Albert Speer recalled that each of them ‘strove to do the best he could and see his abilities confirmed’.

Hitler’s former vice-chancellor Franz von Papen, bragged that his IQ test had placed him third among the defendants, when in fact he had come fifth. By and large, they all scored very well: out of 21 tested, all but three achieved IQ scores above 120, making them ‘superior’ or ‘very superior’.

Of all of them, it was Hermann Göring who most enjoyed the tests. When he was told he had a high IQ, ‘he could hardly contain himself for joy and swelled with pride’. Defeat and imprisonment had done nothing to curb his self-satisfaction. When the examiner said that perhaps he should have become a professor rather than a politician, he replied: ‘I’m convinced that I would have done better than the average man no matter what I went into.’

Kelley happened to be a specialist in the famous Rorschach ‘inkblots’ psychological test, in which patients are shown 10 coloured pictures that look like inkblots and are asked what they see. Proponents of the test felt it offered valuable clues to the psychology of each individual. As the inventor of the test once pointed out, it made a difference ‘whether a patient interprets the red part of a card as an open wound or sees it as rose petals, syrup or slices of ham’.

Kelley and another, less experienced, psychologist called Gustave Gilbert administered the inkblot tests. Göring particularly enjoyed his test, laughing, snapping his fingers in excitement, and concluding that it was regrettable that ‘the Luftwaffe had not had available such excellent testing techniques’.

How did Göring do? The two examiners came to very different conclusions. To the disappointment of many of his peers, who had hoped that the defendants would share a peculiarly repellent personality type, Kelley believed they were ‘essentially sane’, and not out of the ordinary. There was, he concluded, no ‘Nazi personality’. Men like Göring, he said, had ‘strong, dominant, aggressive egocentric personalities’ of a type that abounds in senior management.

‘They can be found anywhere in the country – behind big desks, deciding big affairs as businessmen, politicians and racketeers.’

Gilbert, on the other hand, claimed to have detected something deeper and more resonant. After Göring was found guilty, he visited him in his death cell. Göring asked him what the inkblot test had shown about his personality.

‘I told him: “Frankly, they showed that while you have an active, aggressive mind, you lack the guts to really face responsibility. You betrayed yourself with a little gesture on the inkblot test. Do you remember the card with the red spot? You hesitated but you didn’t call it blood. You tried to flick it off with your finger as though you thought you could wipe away the blood with a little gesture.

“You’ve been doing the same thing all through the trial – taking off your earphones whenever the evidence of your guilt became too unbearable. And you did the same thing during the war, drugging the atrocities out of your mind. You didn’t have the courage to face it. That is your guilt… You are a moral coward.”’

According to Gilbert, Göring glared

The Inkblots Damion Searls Simon & Schuster €28 ★★★★★

‘When told he had a high IQ, Göring could hardly contain himself for joy and swelled with pride’

at him, paused, and then declared that the test was meaningless.

Which of these interpretations was right? Was Göring a coward, unable to face up to his own guilt? Or was he just an averagely aggressive executive high-flier? Were the other experts right in suspecting that, for all its worth, the inkblot test had failed to uncover the most repellent aspects of the Nazis? Or was Göring right in believing it to be meaningless?

This book can be loosely divided into two halves. The first is a fairly straightforward plod through the life of Hermann Rorschach, the inventor of the inkblots, the second a slightly more jaunty look at their influence through the years.

Born in Switzerland in 1884, Hermann was nicknamed ‘inkblot’ at school. Other authors have suggested that this was because playing imaginative games with inkblots was all the rage among Swiss schoolboys back then but Damion Searls argues that it was more of a coincidence.

The young Hermann was extremely bright, with many hobbies and talents. Not only was he good at sketching and cutting out silhouette but he could do a trick with his eyes, making his pupils dilate and expand at will. He was also, as it happens, rather goodlooking. ‘If you think he looks like Brad Pitt, maybe with a little Robert Redford thrown in, you are not the first,’ coos the author.

At times like these, you start to wonder whether he has become infected by his subject, and is rather too prone to making inkblot-style leaps of the imagination. To me, the young Hermann looks much more like his namesake Herman from the Sixties pop group Herman’s Hermits.

At the University of Zurich, Rorschach studied under Eugen Bleuler, the psychologist best known for inventing the terms ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘autism’.

In the early years of the 20th century, Zurich was a touchy hotbed of competing theories about mental illness: Bleuler fell out with Carl Jung, and they both fell out with Freud.

Attached to the Munsterlingen Clinic on the shores of Lake Constance, Rorschach was able to study a colourful selection of patients, including a man who couldn’t see a church spire without thinking that a similarly sharp object was stuck in his own body. Rorschach also came into contact with a cult leader called Johannes Binggeli, whose followers believed he could pass red, blue or green urine at will, and were happy to drink it as communion wine.

Rorschach was an amiable character, good with patients, and soon found that an excellent way of diagnosing schizophrenia was to show them his inkblots and ask them what they saw. In 1921, he published Psychodiagnostics.

A year later, he died of peritonitis, aged just 37, but his playful contribution to the expanding world of psychology was to live on, reaching its peak of popularity in Forties America. Twenty million Americans underwent the Rorschach test in 1944 alone and, by the Fifties, the inkblots were being featured in advertisements and had been adapted for a board game called Personalysis, which promised to give players ‘hilarious, exciting, intimate and revealing “peeks” into the private lives of friends and family’.

These days, the Rorschach test remains popular in Japan and Argentina, but elsewhere tends to be regarded as airy-fairy and subjective. For his part, Searls remains a fan, insisting its rag-bag of slapdash interpreters are more at fault than the test itself.

Nevertheless, as the book ended, I was left thinking of the newly sceptical Göring, and wondering if he might not have a point.

‘You didn’t call it blood. You tried to flick it off with your finger as though you could wipe it away’