The Inkblots

by Damion Searls

  Otherwise he plowed through the rest of his academic work, studying every night through the fall and winter with a friend. “I’ve had it up to here with all this school and practically have bedsores from sitting around so much,” he wrote; he couldn’t wait to “finally, finally! be done with school-stuff.” On January 25, 1909, he declared, “There is nothing keeping me in Switzerland but our mountains.” Exactly one month later, he passed his final exams.

  Rorschach could now practice medicine, but his professional options were limited. He could either work at a university clinic for low pay—impossible in his financial situation—or else work in a more isolated asylum, with a slightly better salary and more practical psychiatric experience but no university career. He lined up a job at the asylum in Münsterlingen, having met its director in 1907 while interning at the hospital nearby. It would start in August. First, though, he wanted to reunite with Olga, meet her family, and lay the groundwork for a permanent move to Russia. He hoped he could earn enough in a year in Russia to pay off his debts, which would take six years or more in Switzerland.

  Immediately after his final exams, he set out to visit Anna in Moscow, then traveled on to Kazan. Hermann was able to perfect his spoken Russian and to work. He observed cases at a neurological clinic and then spent four weeks navigating the red tape to get permission to visit the large Kazan asylum, which housed more than eleven hundred patients and mountains of unexplored case material. “If science is not very far advanced here,” he told Anna, “at least the files are in order.” He saw “a strange mix of peoples among the patients: Russians, Jews, German colonists, Siberian heathens,” although “the doctors here are not concerned about the interesting questions of racial psychiatry,” by which he seems to have meant the heredity of mental illness as well as racial or ethnic differences in psychology. He felt confident that he could easily find a job in Russia, and found himself “very tempted to work at the Kazan asylum later,” or in one of the many in Russia like it. He appreciated “how infinitely freer, more open, more natural, more honest people are with each other here.” Elsewhere, he wrote, “I like Russian life. People are straightforward and you can get ahead quickly (if you don’t need to deal with the authorities).”

  Unfortunately, he did need to, and the maddeningly opaque and arbitrary bureaucracy he encountered made it impossible for him to get credentialed to practice in Russia. “This waiting! In Russia, you simply have to learn to wait….The main unpleasantness is that it’s so hard to get a clear answer….I will need to go through the same detours” as another Swiss colleague, who had spent eight months in St. Petersburg in vain. He would also need to return to the schoolwork he had been so glad to leave behind: literature, geography, and history, this time in Russian. While he understood the need to jump through these hoops—if a delusional patient believed he was Tsar X or Count Y, the doctor had to know what the patient was talking about—he still didn’t relish the prospect.

  It was a trying time personally as well. “Kazan is not a large city like Moscow, but only a very large small town, and you feel it in everything, including the people,” Hermann wrote. It was larger than Zurich but provincial, though it did have a park known as Russian Switzerland, a kind of mirror image of Zurich’s Little Russia. Hermann helped Olga study for her own exams, all twenty-three of them, while Olga’s mother reminded him rather too much of his own stepmother: oppressive to be around and “lacking in understanding.” He and Olga had planned to get married in Russia but in the end didn’t have enough money, “and obviously we didn’t want to get married on credit. I really wanted to have the ceremony, since Olga is off to another job for another five months or so and you never know what might happen. I wanted to give her that at least.”

  Rorschach stayed five months in Russia before returning to Switzerland, no longer as an intern to a string of doctors or an applicant strug gling with the authorities but as an experienced psychiatrist. By that point he had soured somewhat on Olga’s homeland. He was amazed to find Otto Weininger’s deeply misogynist book Sex and Character translated into Russian and widely read there, since, as he had earlier written to Anna,

  no human society treats women with as much respect as in Russia….With us, it’s enough for the man in most cases if a woman is not too stupid, not terribly ugly, and not as poor as a church mouse; as for what she really is, he doesn’t bother much about that. That is not the case in Russia, at least not among the intelligentsia….In Russia, women, especially the most intellectual women, are a force that wants to help society as a whole, and can help, and do help, they don’t just sweep the floors and do the children’s laundry.

  He expected that a book “trying to prove that Woman is worth absolutely nothing and Man is everything” would “only be laughed at” there—he himself dismissed it as “the most outlandish nonsense,” by someone “soon declared insane.” Instead it was a hit.

  Like his early experiences as a student-doctor, which had exposed all kinds of ideals to the cold light of day, Rorschach’s 1909 journey brought his romanticized picture of Russia down to earth. He started to insist, even more snappish than he was in Berlin, that the principle of equal rights for all had arisen in Swiss families, and that “it is true and it remains true that we Western people are on a much higher cultural level” than the “half-Asiatic masses” in Russia. When Anna considered marrying a Russian officer, Hermann was strongly opposed: aside from the fact that she was interested in an officer, not “a doctor or engineer or something like that,” he warned her that “you would have to become a Russian, and that is not good….Think about it: You are the citizen of a free country, the oldest republic in the world! And Russia is the only absolute monarchy in the world, except for a couple of African states….You would be bringing children into the most reactionary state anywhere, instead of the most advanced, and your children might even end up in the most reactionary of armies, the Russian one.”

  As for himself, “I will go back to Russia myself someday, but my fatherland will remain Switzerland, and I can tell you, the events of the last few years have made me more of a patriot than I was before. If our Switzerland was ever endangered, I would fight alongside everyone else for our ancient freedom, our mountains.” In July 1909, he returned to take up his new job in Münsterlingen, Switzerland—but not before one last maddening incident: being stopped at the border and forced to pay a bribe to get out of Russia.

  Rorschach kept a sketchbook while in Russia, with charcoal drawings and color scenes of whatever caught his eye. On one page, after an onion dome church along the Volga River, is this shape, possibly smoke from a smokestack. The caption in Russian says “Steamship Trigorye.” On the left, though, he wrote: “A cookie? A mountain? A cloud?”

  A twenty-four-year-old painter, whenever he sees church towers, has the obsessive thought that a similarly sharp object exists inside his body. He has an intense dislike of Gothic-style pointed arches and feels soothed by the Rococo style, but he also thinks that looking at the airily flowing Rococo lines makes his nerve cells take on corresponding twists and turns. When he walks on a patterned carpet, he feels each geometric shape he steps on pressing down on a hemisphere of his brain.

  J.E., a forty-year-old schizophrenic, feels himself transformed into pictures he sees in books. He adopts the poses of the people depicted, turns into the animals, or even becomes inanimate objects like the large letters on the title page. When he looks at the lightbulb above his bed, he sometimes feels he has been turned into the bulb’s filament: miniaturized, rigid, inserted in the bulb, and glowing.

  L.B. draws one of the spirits she often hallucinates, a human figure, but forgets to draw any arms. When Dr. Rorschach points this out to her, she puts the paper in front of her, says “Upsy!” and raises her arms, staring at the spirit the whole time. Then she says: “Look now, the arms are there now.”

  These were a few of Rorschach’s patients in Münsterlingen. When he himself put together a collection of psychiatric cases, he d
id so visually, taking photographs of hundreds of his patients and binding them into booklets that he organized by diagnosis: “Nervous Ailments,” “Imbecility,” “Manic Depression,” “Hysteria,” “Dementia Praecox: Hebephrenia” (now called disorganized schizophrenia), “Dementia Praecox: Catatonia,” “Dementia Praecox: Paranoia,” and “Forensic Cases.” Rorschach understood by looking and seeing, connected to people by photographing and drawing them. Some of his sketches of patients in the clinic files captured their characteristic gestures so perfectly that the patients who were still alive were recognizable from the sketches decades later. The faces in the photographs occasionally scream or stare blankly into the camera, some heads even sticking out of locked boxes restraining their bodies, but many of the patients show signs of rapport with the young doctor taking their picture.

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  Münsterlingen Clinic, where Rorschach worked from August 1, 1909, until April 1913, is a peaceful complex of buildings on the shores of Lake Constance, built on the site of a monastery founded in 986 by the daughter of Edward I of England. The monastery was torn down in the seventeenth century and rebuilt as a baroque church a quarter mile up the hill, later repurposed as a hospital. Some of the old cloister walls still stand, down near the lake, a low stone line separating nothing from nothing in a circle of nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings. An attractive 1913 brochure for a new wing for women retirees promised a building “in manor style, surrounded by a pretty garden, located directly on the lake with a magnificent view of our beautiful surroundings.” Patients “not in a position to afford the naturally expensive private facilities for an illness of long duration” would receive an “appropriate level of treatment and care in accordance with the modern requirements of psychiatry.”

  Buried in the clinic’s century-old annual reports is a world of details from the mundane to the heartbreaking: cures, deaths, escape attempts (one in 1909, out a window along the ivy then over the outer wall into the lake; four in 1910), forced feedings (972 times total, for ten patients). The number of hours of work therapy over the course of the year: farming, carrying coal, woodwork, housework, gardening, and basket weaving for the men; cooking, laundry, ironing, field work, housework, and “women’s crafts” for the women. The price of beef (rising). “Last year too,” the management reported in 1911, “we were unable to avoid the use of mechanical restraint equipment”: leather gloves for patients who otherwise would systematically pull apart everything they touched, and in some cases, covered bathtubs. “When we see that such patients, despite large doses of sedatives, disturb others’ sleep in the dormitories with their noise and constant thrashing, annoy their fellow patients while awake, and are so rowdy that they smash everything they can reach in their isolation rooms to pieces, and smear themselves and the room with leftover food, excrement, and the like, we can no longer avoid the conclusion that forced stays in a bath are a true blessing for such patients and those around them.” The official report for 1909 listed four hundred patients, 60 percent women, not quite half with schizophrenia and a significant number with manic depression, among a variety of other diagnoses. These were Rorschach’s patients described en masse, not seen as individuals.

  The medical staff at Münsterlingen consisted of the director, Ulrich Brauchli, and two assistants: Rorschach and a Russian, Dr. Paul Sokolov, who spoke German and Russian with Rorschach in alternating weeks for language practice while Olga remained abroad. The staff also included a clinic manager, an assistant manager, and a housemistress, but no other social workers, therapists, assistants, or secretaries, so the three doctors were responsible for everything. Or rather, Rorschach and Sokolov were. “The director is very lazy,” Rorschach griped, “and actually very crude and tactless, but at least he’s easy to get along with.” Brauchli was a former assistant of Eugen Bleuler’s and director of Münsterlingen since 1905; Rorschach had met him in 1907, while working at the hospital up the hill. They were never deeply close, but their relations were cordial, and Rorschach’s view of his boss was basically positive. “It’s totally natural: he’s lazy, we do all the work for him, and he sits around in the sun, or in other words, he’s the director; when he’s away, we all get what we deserve, in other words, we’re the directors and get to sit around in the sun ourselves.”

  Rorschach moved in to a small apartment while Olga remained in Russia, treating typhus and cholera outbreaks. “At last,” he wrote, “for the first time, I am in a position where I’m earning money and have a steady job—all my wishes fulfilled, except that Olga isn’t here.” She arrived six months later, and the Rorschachs were finally married in a civil ceremony in Zurich on April 21, 1910. They pasted three photographs into a photo album—a wedding photo and two pictures of their apartment overlooking the lake—and wrote “May 1, 1910” underneath. Olga described Münsterlingen as “a very nice little town. We have two attractive rooms right on the lake with many flowers.” Hermann worked until seven; then, in the evening, they took walks, or read, or went for a boat ride on the lake, with day trips on Sundays. “Our life here has little diversion, this is an out of the way little town, but Hermann and I don’t need any.”

  Six months after appearing in front of a Zurich magistrate, Hermann and Lola were married again in a Russian Orthodox church ceremony in Geneva. After three days of sightseeing, they traveled onward by boat to Montreux and by train and on foot to Spiez, Lake Thun, and Meiringen: the same route that Rorschach’s beloved Leo Tolstoy had walked at age twenty-eight in 1857, a crucial journey in Tolstoy’s path as a writer and person. The itinerary was popular—that’s why Tolstoy had taken it—but the Rorschachs almost certainly chose it so that they could extend their Russian-Swiss wedding into a Russian-Swiss pilgrimage. On their return, they were “rather relieved” that Brauchli was leaving on vacation. “Lola and I are doing well, very well, we’re in love,” Hermann wrote to Anna a few weeks later. “It’s almost like we’re living on an island, just for ourselves, completely undisturbed.”

  Scenes from Münsterlingen. (this photograph, this photograph, this photograph, this photograph, and this photograph by Hermann Rorschach, ca. 1911–1912) Credit 3

  Lake Constance had dramatically receded, he went on, and would soon be inky black from the winter sky. Rorschach had been living a few steps from its shore for over a year. He had just turned twenty-six.

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  The Rorschachs’ circle of activities gradually widened. “There is a fair for the patients today, some of them Hermann’s patients,” Olga wrote to Anna one August: “All kinds of carousels, puppet theaters, shooting galleries, and so on.” Hermann added, “A carousel, a dance floor, a menagerie, all kinds of things. The patients liked it very much. It’s too bad that these things have to end in the evening.” In other years there would be visiting players from the Güttingen Music Society and, starting in 1913, a large cargo ship rigged specially to take more than a hundred patients on a trip across the lake; it proved so popular that they hoped to be able to repeat the occasion every year.

  Credit 4

  The same photo album that holds the Rorschachs’ wedding picture contains dozens of pictures of these asylum events. Hermann was an avid photographer and seemed to like the challenge of candid photography as much as the festivities he wanted to document. He was a generalist, and curious; to follow just his scientific trajectory would be to miss much of what made his work possible. Again and again, he took pictures of his house and of boat rides just off Münsterlingen, the land from the lake and the lake from the land, the reflections of light and shadow on sky and water. He gave his patients art supplies—not cameras, but paper, paint, clay. Maybe you couldn’t have a conversation with a schizophrenic, but there were other ways to draw a person out.

  After their first Christmas reunited in snowy Münsterlingen, Hermann and Lola filled their days playing chess, playing music—Hermann on his fiddle brought back from Schaffhausen, Lola on a guitar Hermann gave her for Christmas. Hermann thanked Anna for
her “perfect” gift of a book by Gogol. The Rorschachs had sent her an Alpine calendar “to give her something of her homeland every day”—Olga’s idea; she knew what homesickness felt like. The previous year, Hermann without Olga had more pedantically sent his sister Goethe’s Faust, “which you probably haven’t read yet. It is the most magnificent thing that has ever been written in the world.”

  In the background is the building where the Rorschachs lived. Credit 5

  After New Year’s came Carnival. Rorschach designed a program of songs, plays, masked balls, and dancing. As the years went on and demands on his time grew greater, the holiday parties would start to feel like more of a chore, but at first he threw himself into taking part.

  The Rorschachs’ building seen from the lake. Credit 6

  While art therapy, drama therapy, and the like were not unknown, the diversions Rorschach staged seemed to Olga and others more like entertainment than treatment. Still, the way Rorschach described how he hoped his patients would react to the larger-than-life slide projections at the Christmas party suggests that he thought it would bring them some benefit. He even got hold of a monkey, from a troupe of traveling players, and brought it along on his rounds for a few months in another such effort. Some of the severe cases, usually totally nonresponsive, loved the monkey’s grimaces and reacted when it mischievously jumped on their heads and played with their hair. Even if not directly healing, such activities gave Rorschach at least indirect access to his patients’ minds.