The Inkblots

by Damion Searls

  Rorschach’s monkey. He named it Fipps, after Fipps the Monkey, a book by Wilhelm Busch. Credit 7

  When not busy experimenting with monkeys and photography, Rorschach published eleven articles based on his work at Münsterlingen: some were Freudian, some Jungian, and some revealed interests of his own. As a later director of Münsterlingen summarized: “For a period of three years, this scientific output is astonishing, especially when you consider that Rorschach also reviewed a large number of books, wrote voluminous case histories, put in a lot of time-consuming work organizing activities for the patients, wrote humorous songs and rhymes for Carnival, got hold of a monkey, went bowling in the village, and, not least, completed a rigorous scientific monograph on a case of pineal gland tumors, giving up his holidays to investigate the tumors microscopically at the Brain Anatomy Institute in Zurich.”

  One of Rorschach’s articles analyzed a patient’s drawing that, “while seemingly so simple, actually has a very complicated meaning.”

  Schizophrenic’s drawing. Rorschach’s interpretation of this drawing mentions a phallic pipe, magnetic needles, and one male Z and one female Z intersected by question marks; the Z’s were the patient’s initial, the initial of the place where his earlier psychiatrist had lived, the first letter of the word “doubt” in German, and more.

  Another was about a wall painter with artistic ambitions. Among the twenty-four handwritten pages of Rorschach’s case notes in the Münsterlingen files, there is a photograph of the man: wearing a flowing smock, ascot, and beret, with a small flower sticking out of his mouth, and staring eyes. He had copied a small Bible-story woodcut of the Last Supper, except that in his version John cuddles up with Christ; they are all given long, feminine hair except Judas; and Christ is given a strange halo in the form of the bonnet worn by women in the typical local folk costume. The patient probably made his painting on Rorschach’s instigation, Rorschach having recognized that, given his reduced capacities, it was impossible to psychoanalyze him using talk therapy, dream interpretation, or the word association test. Only something visual could be analyzed.

  Those who knew Rorschach said he had a wonderful ability to connect with his patients, helping them by whatever means to re-emerge from their shells of paranoia or catatonic madness. Not a few female patients fell for their handsome doctor, and Rorschach was adept at freeing himself from their grasp without hurting their feelings. He would take the patient’s hand, distract her, and slip out from under her arm. And so, Carnival to Summer Fair to Christmas and New Year’s and around again, Rorschach’s Münsterlingen calendar rolled on.

  —

  Hermann’s time by the lake with Olga was, for him, an apprenticeship in vision. In a birthday letter to Paul, who was thriving in Zurich now that he had left home, Hermann wrote: “I’m glad that you and I are so much closer this year than five birthdays ago, don’t you think? Since you got out you’ve turned into a real man and a good friend remarkably quickly. It wasn’t so fast for me. I had to get married to learn how to see the world properly.” Hermann always gave Olga credit for his own development.

  There was still bad blood between Hermann and his stepmother. “Mother gave me nothing, nothing! as a wedding present, a custom that exists all over the world! Olga was especially stung: ‘It’s not the present that matters to me, it’s the love!’ ” Hermann and Olga avoided visits to Schaffhausen whenever they could. But they invited his half sister Regineli, ten years old, to visit Münsterlingen for two weeks, where she ran wild—a welcome break from the regime back home. They saw a lot of Paul, who, “despite everything he went through in Schaffhausen, is still so good-natured that for a while he was even homesick.” Paul “naturally feels very free” now, Hermann reported, “though he isn’t misusing his freedom”—he even asked his older brother’s advice about pledging lifetime abstinence from alcohol. (Not yet, Hermann said, offering as a reason only that it was unsafe to drink the water in many countries.) Hermann and Olga also visited Rorschach’s extended family in Arbon, only fifteen miles from Münsterlingen, where Olga was warmly received; she was curious to see how the “peasants” lived in Switzerland compared to Russia.

  Rorschach was also writing for Swiss and German newspapers. Having tested the waters while in Russia—getting one piece published in Frankfurt and another in Munich—he now wrote short essays on alcoholism or on “Russian Transformations.” He entered the arena of literature, serializing his translation of Leonid Andreyev’s psychological novella The Thought over the course of a month in a Swiss newspaper. Andreyev was considered one of the leading contemporary Russian writers, and The Thought, as widely read in psychiatric circles as it was by the general public, was a genuinely creepy mix of Poe and Dostoyevsky, drawing on both psychology and Andreyev’s experience as a court reporter. The story is cast as the first-person confession by a remorseless murderer, Kerzhentsev, who has killed his best friend. He describes his plans to get away with the crime by pleading insanity, but there are more than a few hints that he is crazier than he thinks. The thought of the title, which the narrator reveals in the third person, is that maybe “Dr. Kerzhentsev is really insane. He thought that he was simulating madness, but he is really insane. He is insane now.” Andreyev shows us Kerzhentsev’s unreliability to himself and re-creates the same uncertainty in us; the killer confesses in the desperate hope that doctors or judges can solve his existential crisis for him.

  Why was Rorschach—unique among his psychiatrist peers—writing for newspapers? To make a little extra money, for one thing, a strategy he soon gave up on. “This writing for the papers doesn’t bring in much,” he griped to Anna. “I have no real desire to write for the German papers and no real opportunity to write for the Russian ones.” More than income, such articles gave Rorschach an outlet for creative interests outside the bounds of psychology.

  Olga would later say that the secret of her husband’s success was “his constantly moving between different activities. He never worked for hours at a time at one thing….Long conversations on a single topic tired him, even if it was one he found interesting.” Then again, this cannot be the whole story. Rorschach was a “fanatical” note taker, for one thing, with his handwritten excerpts of others’ books, written in a lightning-fast scrawl, sometimes adding up to 240 pages per book. He could not afford to buy books and lived far from central libraries; he also seemed to understand and retain material better by physically copying out a book’s words. (The pages are nearly illegible—the process of transcribing was likely more useful to him than rereading the pages.) Whatever his motivations, it is nearly impossible to imagine Hermann doing this work in the half-hour bursts Olga seems to be describing.

  Rorschach pursued another sideline with Konrad Gehring, a close friend from Schaffhausen three years older than Rorschach who was working as a schoolteacher in Altnau, the next village over from Münsterlingen. He and his wife often came to visit Hermann and Olga. It was with Konrad Gehring, in 1911, that Rorschach conducted his first experiments with inkblots.

  —

  The inkblotter usually considered Rorschach’s main predecessor is Justinus Kerner (1786–1862), a German Romantic poet and a doctor. Some of his wide-ranging accomplishments were in what we would now call medicine: he was the first to describe botulism, the bacterial food poisoning, and the first to suggest its therapeutic properties for muscles—botox. He was also an important figure in a Romantic tradition of psychiatry. His autobiography describes growing up next door to an insane asylum he could see from his window, in a small town that boasted the tower where the historical Doctor Faust practiced black magic. He treated cases of demonic possession with a mix of magnetism and exorcism; was the first biographer of Franz Anton Mesmer, the inventor of mesmerism; and wrote the enormously influential Seeress of Prevorst: Revelations About Our Inner Life and the Incursions of the Spirit World into Ours (1829), describing his experiments on a woman who had mystical visions, saw the future, and spoke secret languages. The Seeress of
Prevorst has been called the first book-length psychiatric case study, and Jung’s dissertation was about a spirit medium who claimed to be the reincarnation of Kerner’s Seeress. Jung also discovered that Nietzsche had unconsciously plagiarized Kerner in Thus Spake Zarathustra; Hermann Hesse called Kerner “curiously gifted, the author of a book in his youth that seems to have caught and gathered up all the radiant beams of the Romantic spirit.”

  Later in life, Kerner assembled a series of what he called Klecksographien (“blotograms”), which he then captioned or paired with decidedly gloomy poems—three “Messenger of Death” poems, twenty-five “Hades Images,” eleven more “Hell Images,” and so on. Inkblot making was a kind of spiritual and spiritualist practice for Kerner. He felt that the images were “incursions of the spirit world,” like the Seeress’s powers. The blots made themselves—magically, unconsciously, inevitably—while he merely “tempted them over” from the hidden world into our own, where they then inspired his poems. At one point, he called his inkblots “daguerreotypes of the invisible world.”

  Two souls tempted over from the other world, by Justinus Kerner, from his “klexographies” Credit 10

  The geographical proximity between Kerner and Rorschach and their common background in psychiatry have made many historians of psychiatry, and art, unable to resist assuming a connection between them. But well after developing his test, Rorschach was asked if he had heard of Kerner, who “apparently did experiments with blots, obviously of a necromantic not scientific sort,” and he answered: “I have heard of Kerner’s experiments but I would be very grateful if you could find me the relevant book. Perhaps some substantive things lie behind the necromancy after all.” He was aware of Kerner’s work in a general sense, but it did not influence his own.

  In any case, “klexography” was a common enough child’s game. Kerner himself had played at inkblots as a child; young Carl Jung had “filled a whole exercise book with ink blots and amused myself giving them fantastic interpretations.” Thoreau tried it too. A Russian woman in Rorschach’s circle recalled a game she had often played when young, where you write your first and last name in ink, fold the paper in half, and “see what your soul says,” and speculated that maybe this game had given him his idea.

  In psychology proper, inkblots had occasionally been used before as a way to measure the amount of imagination someone had, especially schoolchildren. A French psychiatrist named Alfred Binet was the first to have had the idea, in 1895. For Binet, a person’s psychology consisted of ten capacities, including memory, attention, force of will, moral sentiments, suggestibility, and imagination. Each capacity could be measured with its own test—for example, someone’s ability to reproduce a complicated geometric shape tested how good or bad their memory was. As for imagination: “After asking about the number of novels the person usually reads, the kind of pleasure he takes from them, his taste in theater, music, games, etc., one can proceed to direct experiments. Take a strange-shaped blot of ink on a white sheet of paper: some people will see nothing there; for others with a lively visual imagination (Leonardo da Vinci for example), the little inkblot will be full of shapes, and one can note down the kind and number of shapes the person sees.” If a subject saw one or two things, he didn’t have much imagination; if he saw twenty, he had a lot. The question was how many things you could find in a random blot, not what a carefully designed blot could find in you.

  From Binet, the idea of measuring imagination with inkblots spread to a string of American intelligence-testing pioneers and educators—Dearborn, Sharp, Whipple, Kirkpatrick. It reached Russia as well, where a psychology professor named Fyodor Rybakov, unaware of the Americans’ work, included a series of eight blots in his Atlas of the Experimental-Psychology Study of Personality (1910). It was an American, Guy Montrose Whipple, who called his version an “ink-blot test” in his Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (also 1910)—this is why the Rorschach cards would come to be called “inkblots” when American psychologists took them up, even though Rorschach’s final images would use paint, not just ink, and would not be simply blotted.

  Rorschach knew Binet’s work and was familiar with Binet’s own inspiration—Leonardo da Vinci, who in his “Treatise on Painting” described throwing paint at a wall and looking at the stains for inspiration. But he was unaware of Binet’s Russian and American followers. Still, Rorschach’s early inkblot testing was similar to these efforts in some ways. The specific shapes were not really the point, with Dearborn cranking out 120 blots for one study, 100 for another. In the latter, he laid them out in a ten-by-ten grid and asked subjects to spend fifteen minutes choosing and ranking which ten blots were most like a 101st blot. He was studying pattern recognition, not interpretation.

  Likewise, Rorschach’s early blots were not standardized: new ones were made fresh each time, with fountain-pen ink on normal white paper, several blots per page, sometimes as many as a dozen (see this page). Patients, and Gehring’s schoolchildren aged twelve to fifteen, were shown the blots, then Rorschach and Gehring would mark them up with notes of what was seen where, or else the patients and students themselves would draw pictures of what they saw. This was not so different from the other visual expressions Rorschach encouraged his patients to make: the drawings, the paintings. Sometimes they chewed or wetted newspapers, scrunched them into heads with buttons for eyes, and gave the heads to Dr. Rorschach, who lacquered and kept them. One of these paper heads, with a large Cyclopian button in the middle, made an especially powerful impression on Gehring’s wife. She was skeptical about inkblots at first, until she saw the insightful analysis Hermann was able to give of people’s answers. When Gehring tried the blots out on his students, he got no great results—his country boys didn’t see much. Rorschach’s patients saw much more.

  These early experiments were simply one more avenue of exploration among many, and Rorschach abandoned them without hesitation when the Gehrings moved away. They were not the Rorschach test to come, though one wonders about those insightful interpretations that so impressed Mrs. Gehring. Still, Rorschach was showing people inkblots in connection with research on the nature of perception, not the measuring of imagination; he was already interested in what people saw, and how, not just how much. But in 1912 crucial pieces in Rorschach’s thinking were still missing, and other approaches to studying perception seemed far more promising.

  Frau B.G., a schizophrenic patient at Münsterlingen in love with one of the male nurses, thought he was trying to attack her sex organs with a little knife. Sometimes she saw floaters as little knives twirling through the air before her eyes, and when she did, she felt a violent slash below the waist. She also extended these ideas to other kinds of hallucination. Whenever she looked out the window and saw a workman mowing the lawn, she felt the swipes of the scythe in her own neck, something she found infuriating, since she knew perfectly well that the scythe couldn’t reach her.

  Her case reminded Rorschach of a dream he had had himself, back in Zurich. Years later, the dream remained vivid in his mind:

  In my first clinical semester, I was present at an autopsy for the first time, and I looked on with all the well-known eagerness of a young student. I was especially interested in the dissection of the brain, connecting it to all sorts of reflections about where thoughts and feelings were located, slicing up the soul, etc. The deceased had been a stroke victim, and the brain was dissected in transverse slices. That night I had a dream in which I felt my own brain being cut in transverse slices. One slice after the other was detached from the mass of the hemispheres and fell forward, exactly as had happened at the autopsy. This bodily sensation (unfortunately, I have no more precise expression at my disposal) was very clear, and the image of this dream experience in my memory is even today quite vivid; it has the quality—weak, but nonetheless clear and perceivable through the senses—of a lived, experienced perception.

  It would certainly be possible to ask Freudian questions about this dream’s content, but Rorsch
ach’s interests lay elsewhere. No one, he pointed out, could ever feel his own brain being sliced apart; Frau B.G. had never actually been scythed in the neck either. And yet the “lived, experienced perception” was real. And the feeling in the dream didn’t merely come after seeing the autopsy—they had, he felt, “a much closer and more intimate relationship, almost as if the visual perception had been translated, transposed, or turned into a bodily sensation.” The marvelous fact was that seeing something could make a person feel something, even something impossible to feel. One sensation could turn into another.

  Rorschach had been paying attention to such experiences for years. There were the toothache pains he had transposed into high and low notes as a teenager, and the muscle memory that let him remember a violin melody by moving his fingers. As a child, he had played a game where a group of kids told a boy they were going to pull out one of his teeth, then grabbed the tooth and unexpectedly pinched the boy’s calf, which made him scream and think they had pulled out a tooth. The boy felt the pain not where it was but where he expected to feel it. As a doctor, Rorschach had noticed how hard it was to get a child to say exactly where he or she was hurt, because the pain had no precise location. And at Münsterlingen, there were the same kinds of experience all around, if you knew where to look for them: “We who live on Lake Constance have, for a long time now, localized any humming noise we hear in the air, expecting to see Zeppelin’s airship come into view.”

  Rorschach realized that one fact about perception underlay all these experiences. Sensations could be detached from their original location and felt somewhere else, a process called relocalization. We have never flown like a bird, but we can dream of flying because we have done headstands, or jumped from a hayloft into a haystack. The slicing off of his brain in the dream “felt like getting a haircut, the slices fell forward the way a tired arm falls to a person’s side, in other words these were known qualities localized in an unusual place.” Relocalization was what made impossible sensations possible.