The Inkblots

by Damion Searls

  In 1895, unsettling rumors were beginning to go around Schwarzenburg, a mountain village in central Switzerland. A man named Johannes Binggeli, married, sixty-one years old, was the head of a community of true believers called the Forest Brotherhood. He was a mystic, a preacher, and the author of various pamphlets dictated to him by the Holy Spirit. A tailor by trade, he would sometimes be hired by locals, but usually only to predict winning lottery numbers. The Brotherhood, ninety-three members strong, kept largely to itself.

  Then a woman in the Brotherhood was arrested for concealing the birth of her child and named Binggeli as the father. Two years earlier, she had been unable to urinate for eight days and Binggeli had said that her Water Gate was under a spell, which he removed by having sex with her. She was cured, but their sexual relationship continued. Other members of the congregation began to come forward with stories about Binggeli using intercourse to expel demons from women and young girls. The authorities discovered that there was an esoteric sect within the Forest Brotherhood, one that worshipped Binggeli as “the Word of God made flesh once more.” Binggeli’s penis was the “Shaft of Christ,” and his urine, “Heaven’s Drops” or “Heaven’s Balm,” had healing properties: his worshippers drank it or applied it externally to fight illness or temptations. He was said to be able to pass red, blue, or green urine at will, and he sometimes used it as Communion wine.

  Binggeli was found to have committed incest with his daughter repeatedly between 1892 and 1895: of her three illegitimate children, at least one, probably two, were his. After his arrest, he claimed at various times that he hadn’t done it; that he had, but only in a dream, to protect her from cat-shaped and mouse-shaped demons; that the law did not apply to him because he was not constituted like other human beings. Binggeli was found insane and sent to the nearby Münsingen asylum for four and a half years, from July 1896 to February 1901.

  In April 1913, Rorschach transferred to Münsingen. Ulrich Brauchli, Rorschach’s boss in Münsterlingen, had been promoted to director of the new, larger, more prestigious institution near Bern, and Brauchli’s replacement, one Hermann Wille, was less than pleasant to work with. Rorschach followed Brauchli, while Olga, earning money and pursuing her own career as a doctor, had to stay at Münsterlingen for three months until her position ended. They were separated again, although by only 120 miles this time.

  Rorschach stumbled onto Binggeli’s patient file in Münsingen and was fascinated. Researching further, he discovered that Binggeli’s Forest Brotherhood had grown out of an earlier, more widespread movement, the Antonianers, founded by Antoni Unternährer in the Napoleonic era and surviving into the twentieth century in both Europe and America. These religious movements likely reawakened his interest in the Dukhobor sect, which he had discovered through Ivan Tregubov. Rorschach tracked down Binggeli in person and went to visit him in his mountain retreat, where he now lived with a small core of believers including his second wife, his daughter, and the son who was also his grandson. Binggeli “was in his eightieth year by then,” Rorschach wrote, “senile and asthmatic. He was a dwarfish little man with a large head, large torso, and short arms and legs” who “always wore the traditional Schwarzenburg folk costume with brightly polished metal buttons, seven on each side”—these shiny metal objects, along with his watch chain, played a key role in his delusions. Rorschach was able “to convince him without much trouble to let himself be photographed.”

  This was the start of a project on Swiss sect activity that, by 1915 at the latest, Rorschach was sure would be his lifework. He had taken his physiological studies of perception as far as he then could, so he broadened his focus to cultural ways of seeing—and gave his broad curiosity free rein. When not busy treating patients, he gathered material on other archaic phallic cults in Switzerland and gradually assembled an astonishing body of research, synthesizing the psychology of religion with sociology, psychiatry, folklore, history, and psychoanalysis.

  He found that sect activity always appeared in the same regions, along frontiers of race or political sympathies—that is, in earlier war zones. He made a hand-colored map showing that areas of sect activity corresponded with high concentrations of weavers, and speculated about why. Historically, he traced sect activity in these regions back through earlier Protestant cults to the twelfth-century Waldensians and thirteenth-century Brethren of the Free Spirit, to still earlier heresies and separatist movements, all leaving clear traces in the region down to the present day. Psychologically, he argued along Jungian lines that schizophrenic delusions tap into the same psychic sources as ancient belief systems, and he noted similarities between the images and ideas of this entire history of sects to those of myths and philosophies reaching back to the ancient Gnostics. He showed, for instance, that the eighteenth-century Antonianers’ teachings matched, in detail, those of first-century Adamites.

  Sociologically, he argued that in founding a sect a charismatic leader was less important than a receptive group of followers—a community can manufacture a leader out of almost anyone, if the need is strong enough, and when sects were imported from elsewhere, they tended to die out quickly unless the community was already primed. He distinguished between active and passive followers, as well as between hysterical leaders, whose messages were determined by personal complexes, and the more powerful schizophrenic leaders, whose doctrines tapped deeply into archetypal mythologies.

  His lectures and essays on the topic of sects, both academic and nonacademic, were some of his liveliest writing—equally interesting as biography, case study, history, theology, and psychology. He had plans for “a thick book” to address a range of questions:

  Why can one schizophrenic found a community and another can’t? Why does a schizophrenic retrace primitive man’s ideas while a neurotic follows local superstitions? And how do these various things relate to the respective populations? Why are sects always where there are textile industries? Which races are the carriers of the local indigenous sects, and which join only the imported ones? All with numerous mythological, ethnological, religious, historical, and other parallels!

  This was Rorschach the thinker, not Rorschach the doctor. Like Freud, Jung, and the other pioneers of his time, he wanted to do more than treat patients: he wanted to bring culture and psychology together to explore the nature and meaning of individual and communal belief.

  As part of the Zurich School, Rorschach believed in an interplay between individual psychology and culture, and he resisted claiming that one universal psychology applied to everyone. What may look like a radical detour in Rorschach’s career was part of his lifelong effort to understand the particular ways that different people see things differently.

  —

  As he widened the focus of his work, Rorschach was once again restless to leave Switzerland. He had tackled the Moscow bureaucracy again, this time with more success: the Swiss ambassador confirmed that Rorschach would be able to take the first Russian state medical exam offered in 1914. In December 1913, he and Olga left Münsingen for a cosmopolitan environment where it was common knowledge that psychology and art were inextricable: Russia.

  It was an exhilarating time to go. Russian culture was in its so-called Silver Age, saturated with reciprocal influences of art, science, and occult belief. Russian science, especially in an era of revolutionary turmoil and sweeping cultural movements, was less specialized and segregated than in the West. As Alexander Etkind, the major historian of psychoanalysis in Russia, has written: “Decadent poets, moral philosophers, and professional revolutionaries have played as great a role in the history of psychoanalysis in Russia as have physicians and psychologists”; from the other side, in the words of John Bowlt, a leading cultural historian of modernist Russia, “No appreciation of that ‘hysterical, spiritually tormented time’ can be complete” without reference both to the artistic figures—Chekhov and Akhmatova, Fabergé and Chagall, Diaghilev and Nijinsky, Kandinsky and Malevich, Stravinsky and Mayakovsky—and to the “extraordina
ry progress in the Russian sciences,” from rocket engineering to Pavlov’s behaviorist psychology.

  Rorschach was offered a job at an elite private clinic just outside of Moscow, the Kryukovo, run by the leading psychoanalysts in Russia and full of writers and artists. In many ways, this was an ideal setting for Rorschach. It was a private clinic for voluntary patients of nervous illnesses, as was typical in Russia at the time, and quite a change from the packed hospitals he was used to. Founded by doctors without salaries from universities or state hospitals, such institutions became partly commercial enterprises, which meant they paid well—and at least they concentrated on selling their services to the patients, not, as with English “madhouses,” to families who simply wanted patients locked away. The clinic was in a rural setting, to take advantage of the healing properties of “natural, healthy living,” and patients were treated humanely and well. The psychiatrists were free to combine theories, experiment with new therapies, and take a holistic approach: “to heal by the intimate and supportive psychological atmosphere, and by the physician’s ‘personality,’ rather than relying on any given theory,” in the words of one doctor there, Nikolai Osipov.

  The Kryukovo doctors were generalists and public intellectuals. Osipov, for instance, would later become a well-known Tolstoy expert and a lecturer on Dostoyevsky and Turgenev as well. As for the patients, they included leading cultural figures, among them the preeminent Russian Symbolist poet Alexander Blok and the great actor Mikhail Chekhov, nephew of the playwright—the sanatorium gave preferential treatment to writers, doctors, and relatives of the late Anton Chekhov. After years of putting on amateur plays in a Swiss backwater and translating Andreyev in his spare time, Rorschach found himself in a cultural center.

  Coursing through the Russian Silver Age were a number of themes close to Rorschach’s heart: synesthesia, madness, visual art as self-expression. Movement, the key element in the reflex hallucinations Rorschach had studied, was here seen as “the basic feature of reality,” in the words of modern novelist Andrei Bely; theorists of the Russian ballet called movement the most important aspect of all great art.

  Within psychology, the sectarian distinctions that seemed so important in far-off western Europe largely fell away. A 1909 advertising brochure for the Kryukovo proclaimed that patients would receive “hypnosis, suggestion, and psychoanalysis,” as well as “psychotherapy in its proper sense”—meaning so-called rational therapy, a technique pioneered by another Swiss, Paul Dubois, which for a time was more prominent and popular than Freud’s method (much as a similar approach, now called cognitive-behavioral therapy, is today). No battle lines were drawn between the different camps.

  And the inspiration for Russian psychiatry was Tolstoy, the wise, humanistic soul-healer who had inspired Rorschach too. One reason psychoanalysis was so well received in Russia was that it meshed with homegrown traditions of introspection, “purification of the soul,” existential reflections on the deep questions of human life, and respect for people’s inner worlds. If Rorschach’s mix of ideals and intellectual interests—generalist, nonsectarian, broadly humanist, literary, visual—seemed idiosyncratic in a western European context, it was standard for Russian psychiatrists.

  Freud had joked in a 1912 letter to Jung that “there seems to be a local epidemic of psychoanalysis” in Russia, but it was not in fact a one-way relationship, an “epidemic” spreading from Europe to the hinterlands. Russians were prominent psychoanalysts in both Russia and the West. Osipov, Rorschach’s Kryukovo colleague, published the first journal of psychoanalysis anywhere and sat on the board of Freud’s journal. Even supposedly “European” ideas were not themselves un-Russian. Freud called the psychic mechanism of repressing unacceptable psychological material “censorship,” an explicit allusion to Russian political censorship: in his definition, the “imperfect instrument of the Tsarist regime for preventing penetration of alien Western influences.” Many of Freud’s patients were Slavic, often Russian, including the “Wolf Man,” the exemplary patient whose case he chose as the subject of his most important case study. Jung’s first psychoanalytic patient, who exerted the greatest influence on his own life and work, was the Russian Sabina Spielrein. The list goes on. If the history of psychiatry is the story not only of its doctors and theorists but also of its patients, then it is largely a tale of Russian culture.

  Rorschach’s own psychoanalytic approach grew out of his experience treating Russians, most obviously because the Kryukovo was where he had patients he could psychoanalyze—unlike the psychotics in the Swiss asylums, or criminal cases needing quick evaluation, such as Johannes Neuwirth. But he also came to see psychoanalysis as intrinsically linked to aspects of Russian culture. In a lecture he later gave to a general audience on the subject, he said that Russian and Swiss neuroses worked in more or less the same way, although there were certain “quantitative differences” between the populations, but that psychoanalysis was more effective on Slavic patients than those of German background. Not only were “most of them good self-observers (or self-devourers, as their saying goes, since this self-observation often grows into a truly tormenting, devouring addiction),” but they could express themselves more freely, “not inhibited by all kinds of prejudices.” Russians were “much more tolerant of illness than other peoples,” without “the contempt that we Swiss so often feel along with our pity.” Those with nervous illnesses could seek treatment in an institution without fear of “damaging stigma” upon their release. The idea of Russia he had fallen in love with through Olga—the “Russian” ability to express one’s feelings—now carried over to his sense of his patients and shaped his psychiatric practice.

  —

  Rorschach’s months at the Kryukovo in early 1914 came at a watershed moment in Russian art, one that redefined the power of visual images. Russian Futurism was in full force, and Rorschach witnessed it firsthand. Probably in 1915, he drafted an essay called “The Psychology of Futurism,” whose journalistic opening set the scene nicely: “Futurism, as it presents itself today to an astonished world, appears at first to be a colorful jumble of incomprehensible images and sculptures, of high-sounding manifestos and inarticulate sounds, of noisy art and artistic noise, of a will to power and a will to illogicality. Only one common theme is distinct: An unbounded self-confidence and a perhaps even more boundless condemnation of everything that came before, a battle-cry against all of the concepts that until today have shaped the course of culture, art, and daily life.”

  Futurism was a modernist pressure cooker in which everything seemed to be shattering or dissolving at once. An explosion of energy in literature, painting, theater, and music, its Russian version contained a swarm of submovements, cliques, and branding strategies, including Cubo-Futurism, Ego-Futurism, Everythingism, Centrifuge, and the excellently named Mezzanine of Poetry. These were discussed in the press almost daily while Rorschach was in Russia, and in January and February 1914 the leading Italian Futurist, F. T. Marinetti, gave well-publicized and well-attended lectures in Moscow. The movement took to the streets with parades in which artists would “walk with painted faces among the crowds, reciting futurist poetry.” When a little girl gave one parading poet an orange, he began to eat it. “He’s eating, he’s eating,” the astonished crowd whispered, as if the Futurists were Martians; a nationwide tour soon followed.

  The Futurists’ explorations resonated with many of Rorschach’s interests. The composer and painter Mikhail Matyushin, a follower of Ernst Haeckel, studied chance forms of driftwood, wrote theories of color, and tried to expand human visual capacity, in part with exercises meant to regenerate lost optical nerves in the back of the head and the soles of the feet. Nikolai Kulbin, whom Rorschach heard lecture, was an artist and medical doctor who published books and scientific articles on sensory perception and psychological testing. He had this psychological slogan as his motto: “The self does not know anything except its own feelings, and while projecting these feelings it creates its own world.�
�� Poet Aleksei Kruchenykh championed “seeing things on both sides” and “subjective objectivity”: “Let a book be small, but…everything the writer’s own, to the last ink blot.” Futurists published synesthetic works such as Intuitive Colors and tables of correspondences between colors and musical notes; manifestos on how neologisms and mistakes “bring about movement and the new perception of the word”; a poem where the poet is in a movie theater and, making a special effort, begins to see the image upside down. These and other key figures are mentioned or quoted in Rorschach’s Futurism essay.

  He acknowledged that Futurism seemed crazy and illogical but affirmed that “the time has now passed when any movement, any action, can be dismissed as ‘crazy.’…There is no such thing as absolute nonsense. Even in the darkest and most elaborate delusions of our dementia praecox patients, there exists a hidden meaning.” He drew the parallel between Futurism and schizophrenia in Zurich School terms, justifying the wider applicability of psychoanalytic theory: “Connections unimaginable until now have been forged with the elaboration of the depth psychology that Freud has pioneered….Not only neurotic symptoms and delusional systems and dreams but also myths, fairy tales, poems, musical works, paintings—all have proved to be accessible to psychoanalytical research.” As a result, “Even if we decide to describe Futurism as madness and nonsense, we still have the obligation to find sense in that nonsense.”

  Rorschach took Futurism seriously and found sense in it specific enough to criticize. In the most original analysis in his Futurism essay, he argued that the Futurists misunderstood how images generate a feeling of movement. He pointed out that usually only cartoonists, like his old favorite Wilhelm Busch, try to present motion by showing an object in multiple states at once, for instance by giving a vigorous pianist numerous arms and hands. Michelangelo’s sculptures or paintings, in contrast, are themselves dynamic—they make you feel the movement. The Futurists, with their dozen-legged dogs, made the mistake of trying an approach like Busch’s, but Rorschach was unusually firm: for an artist aspiring to more than cartoons, “there is no other way to handle motion” than Michelangelo’s way; “The only serious way to represent motion in an object is by influencing the kinesthetic sense of the beholder.” The Futurist strategy is “impossible” because it misunderstands the relationship between empathy—Vischer’s term hineinfühlen—and vision: “There is no need to consult the philosophers and psychologists, but simply the physiologists. Multiple legs next to each other do not awaken an idea of movement, or only in a very abstract way, just as a human being cannot empathize with a millipede along kinesthetic pathways.”