Visual images, at least if they’re good, produce mental states—they “awaken an idea” in the viewer. At one point in his essay draft, between X’s, Rorschach inserted without explanation a Russian quotation:
X
A picture—The rails on which the viewer’s imagination must roll, according to the artist’s representation.
X
In Switzerland, Rorschach and Gehring had used inkblots to gauge the viewer’s imagination, treating it as a measurable quantity. Here was a vision of pictures changing the viewer’s imagination—leading it, as on rails, in a new direction.
Regardless of his specific arguments, a psychiatrist writing about “the psychology of Futurism” in 1915, engaging with avant-garde art in ways entirely consistent with his psychiatric theory and practice, was ahead of his time. Freud would freely admit that he was a philistine about modern art; Jung would write one essay on Joyce and one on Picasso, both superficial and dismissive, and would be widely mocked, never going near the subject again. There were other psychiatrists more attentive to art, and artists who studied psychology, even outside of Russia—the German surrealist Max Ernst, for instance, had extensive university training in psychiatry. But Rorschach was a uniquely knowledgeable figure to straddle the disciplinary divide.
Wilhelm Busch, from “The Virtuoso” (1865); Giacomo Balla’s Futurist Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), using the strategy Rorschach thought suitable only for comics. Rorschach had already mocked “Expressionism!” in a high school yearbook drawing; later, in this and other series of small paintings, he explored how to capture movement more effectively. Credit 11, Credit 12
Beyond Futurism, western European and Russian ideas were coming together in the nineteen-tens to create abstract art. The figures usually credited as the first purely abstract modern artists are the Dutchman Piet Mondrian, the Russian Kazimir Malevich, the Russian émigré in Munich Wassily Kandinsky, and the Swiss Sophie Taeuber. Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy was a shared point of reference. Rorschach’s Futurism essay just predated the defining event in the birth of modern art in Switzerland: the creation of Dadaism in a Zurich cabaret in February 1916. Sophie Taeuber took part, along with her future husband Hans (Jean) Arp; at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts, where Ulrich Rorschach had studied a generation before, Taeuber taught what Arp called “bevies of girls hastening to Zurich from all the cantons of Switzerland, with the burning desire to neverendingly embroider floral wreaths on cushions,” and “managed to bring most of them to embrace the square.”
There is no record of any direct contact between Rorschach and the Dadaists, but he certainly followed developments in western European modern art. He had made a cartoon satirizing Expressionism in high school; he would later use the Austrian Expressionist artist Alfred Kubin to illustrate his theories about introversion and extraversion. More generally, he would bring his insights about art and psychology back from Russia to his psychiatric practice in Switzerland.
—
Hermann and Olga’s “chronic question” of where to settle down had continued to pull the couple in opposite directions. Hermann found in 1914, as he had in 1909, that however drawn he was to Russian culture, the reality of life there was a different matter. Olga liked the unpredictability of life in Russia; Hermann experienced it as chaotic. Olga dismissed Hermann’s ambitions as “a European longing for ‘achievement,’ ” saying “he had a kind of fear of succumbing to Russia’s magic.” And what she perceived as warm companionship sometimes felt too intrusive to the introverted Hermann, who had already complained to Anna about the overly social Russian culture—“It’s very hard to work at home here; open doors and visits all day long.” Anna later recalled that the endless conversations one found oneself having in Russia left Hermann with “a great longing to be alone”: for all the interesting patients at Kryukovo, they took up so much of his time and energy that “he had no free time to write down his observations or work on them. He told me that he felt like a painter standing in front of a wonderful landscape without paper or paint.” She did not think that Hermann ever wanted to live abroad again after that experience.
A long string of late-night family fights finally ended at 2 a.m. one May morning in 1914. Hermann had prevailed. It was impossible to get a job at the world-famous Burghölzli, but he found a job at the Waldau, in Bolligen on the outskirts of Bern, one of the only two other university-based psychiatric hospitals in German-speaking Switzerland. He wrote from Russia to a colleague at the Waldau, saying that “after our endless gypsy wanderings, we feel a strong need to finally settle down.” It was an anxious letter: “Would you be so kind as to give me some information about the rooms we are being offered in Waldau? How big are they—how many paces? How many windows? What about the entrance, how many stairs and hallways? Are the rooms all together? Would a comfortable married life be possible there?” The answer he received must have been reassuring enough. He left Russia for Switzerland on June 24, 1914, never to return.
Olga planned to stay in Kazan about six weeks before following her husband, but no sooner had he returned to the West than Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo, on June 28, and by the end of Olga’s six weeks the Great War had begun. She remained in Russia for ten more months, until the spring of 1915. This long separation—their fourth at least—was by choice as well as by circumstance. Olga was not ready to give up on her dream of staying in Russia and could not bring herself to leave her homeland just yet, especially in its time of need. Without her, Hermann’s worries about the apartment were moot, and the “small but nice new three-room apartment on the fourth floor of the central clinic building” was fine—Rorschach called it “my dovecote,” a perfect garret for solitude and hard work.
The future colleague Rorschach had written to from Russia was Walter Morgenthaler (1882–1965), whom Rorschach knew from his Münsterlingen days. When Rorschach arrived at the Waldau, Morgenthaler was busy searching through the case histories to find patients’ drawings for his growing collection, encouraging patients to draw as much as they wanted, and systematically promoting their artistic activity by giving them paper, asking them to draw, and assigning specific topics (a man, woman, and child; a house; a garden). Morgenthaler recalled Rorschach’s rapport with patients along just these lines: “The son of a drawing teacher and a very good draftsman himself, he was vitally interested in patients’ drawings. He had an amazing gift for getting patients to draw.”
Rorschach found out, for instance, that one catatonic patient, who spent most of every day lying or sitting stiffly in bed, had been a good draftsman before falling ill. Rorschach laid out on his blanket not just a sketch pad and a handful of colored pencils but a large maple leaf with a crawling maybug tethered to it with tape. Not just art supplies, but something to look at; not just an object, but life in motion. The next day, beaming with delight, Rorschach showed Morgenthaler and their boss the patient’s extremely accurate colored drawing of the beetle on the leaf. Although this patient had not moved for months, he now slowly started to draw more, then took painting classes, improved further, and was eventually discharged.
Rorschach was enthusiastic about Morgenthaler’s research into art and mental illness, and with reason: Morgenthaler was working on a pioneering study of art and mental illness. One of his patients was a schizophrenic named Adolf Wölfli, hospitalized since 1895, who had developed into a visual artist, writer, and composer, producing a large body of drawings by 1914. In 1921, Morgenthaler would publish the groundbreaking A Mental Patient as Artist (1921), which would influence everyone from the Surrealists—André Breton grouped Wölfli with Picasso and the Russian mystic Gurdjieff as important inspirations, calling Wölfli’s art “one of the three or four most important bodies of work in the twentieth century”—to Rainer Maria Rilke, who thought his case “will help us someday gain new insights into the origins of creativity.” Wölfli would become the paradigmatic outsider artist of the century.
Rorschach like
ly saw Wölfli on his rounds and helped Morgenthaler treat him. He looked for visually interesting material in the Waldau files for Morgenthaler and promised that “one of the first things he would do” after leaving the Waldau was start a collection of patients’ drawings like Morgenthaler’s. This departure was looming: when Olga eventually did return to Switzerland, the Rorschachs decided that the apartment was too small after all, as was the salary. They moved again, to Herisau in northeastern Switzerland.
Hermann’s years of wandering from 1913 through 1915 had helped him envision a more holistic, humanistic psychology. Discovering Binggeli had taken his interest in perception in an anthropological direction, showing him a way into the dark core of individual and collective belief, where psychology meets culture. Russian culture gave him a model for linking art and science. And the Futurists and Wölfli showed him how closely psychological explorations could be tied to art. This deeper understanding of the power of visual images would soon lead to his breakthrough.
Herisau lies in a landscape of high rolling hills, sunny Sound of Music summers with Alpine rambles and wildflowers dotting the meadows giving way to early autumns, bleak cold winters of heavy snows, and long, wet springs. It has one of the highest elevations of any town in Switzerland, and “even when St. Gallen”—the glorious monastery town about five miles away—“is under a deep fog, we often have sunshine and clear air here,” Rorschach wrote to his brother. His relatives in Arbon were nearby, about fifteen miles to the north; on a clear day, Rorschach could see Lake Constance from the hill where he lived. The Säntis, the highest peak in the region and his destination for hikes, was the same distance away to the south, visible out Rorschach’s second-floor window—he always seemed to choose upstairs apartments. “It is especially beautiful here in winter, late spring, and late fall,” Rorschach wrote of his new home. “Fall is probably our most beautiful time, with a clear view into the distance.”
Rorschach lived in Herisau longer than anywhere else except Schaffhausen. It was where he raised his family, pursued his career and his calling. The Krombach, the canton psychiatric hospital, was on a hill to the west of town. Opened in 1908, not long before Rorschach’s arrival in 1915, it was the first asylum in Switzerland built using the pavilion system: buildings in parklike surroundings, separated to limit the spread of infections as well as for therapeutic benefits. Behind the administration building there were three buildings for men and three for women, and a chapel in the middle. By Rorschach’s time, the hospital built for 250 patients held about 400, most of them severely psychotic. It was primarily a custodial institution—less politely, a holding facility—rather than a place of treatment.
The doctors and staff lived at the Krombach alongside the patients, relatively isolated in the picturesque surroundings. The population of Herisau was around fifteen thousand, increasingly from outside the canton and the country, predominantly textile workers; St. Gallen produced half of the world’s embroidery in 1910. Herisau had a movie theater and a few amenities but not much to offer, especially after the textile industry’s collapse following World War I. The canton, Appenzell Ausserrhoden, was rural and largely conservative, with a population famously reserved toward outsiders. Rorschach identified more closely with the stereotypically slow and introverted Bernese than with the Appenzellers but got along with the locals, respecting them without trying to be one of them.
It was an enormous relief to Hermann and Olga that their “gypsy wanderings” had come to an end. They had a large apartment at last, about a hundred feet long and full of windows, arcing around the front of the administration building; a painting Hermann made later showed the airy rooms with a view in summer (see this page). When the moving van arrived it was almost empty, yet Hermann could write to his brother, soon after, “We are sitting on some of our own furniture, can you imagine? It’s a real experience.”
The asylum director was Arnold Koller, an uninspiring doctor but diligent administrator. He had efficiently managed the Krombach’s construction—in retrospect, the high point of his career—and his handwritten reminiscences describe life there. “Once the institution was running smoothly,” he admitted, “its direction did not require too much work.” As another student of Bleuler’s, Koller championed a personal understanding of patients’ physical and mental well-being, but he was an uptight man, rigid and moralistic: his son remembers telling a lie and his father responding, “I would rather you die than keep doing that.”
Koller also cared deeply about budgets and costs; Rorschach called him “somewhat small-minded and a born statistician,” and every year like clockwork he was driven slightly insane by having to write up and analyze the year’s numbers—“Statistics Week,” he called it. January 1920: “I have only just finished the most unpleasant work in the institutional year: the statistics for 1919. After days and days of absolute imbecility, I am slowly returning to consciousness.” January 1921: “I am still suffering from a case of statistical dementia, able only to address the most necessary matters….I am looking forward to Freud’s forthcoming book, but is there anything Beyond the Pleasure Principle that makes life worth living? What will Freud say? I know one thing that lies beyond the pleasure principle—statistics!”
Rorschach kept up appearances, writing Welcome Back notes whenever the director and his family returned from their trips, with charming drawings and little poems describing what had happened during the four weeks they were away. Koller’s son Rudi remembered the notes vividly forty years later and recalled Rorschach as extraordinarily gifted but modest, never putting himself forward, “the soul of the entire institution”—this according to the son of its director. The boy was six or seven when he had a severe appendix pain while his father was away; Rorschach sat down next to him, took off his wedding ring, and hypnotized Rudi with it: talked to him, put him to sleep, and when the boy woke up his pain was gone.
Rorschach’s workdays began with a morning meeting with Koller, after which he was off on his rounds, handling the acute male and female patients. Terrible screaming filled the halls; one day, Hermann turned up at his apartment with his clothes ripped open from top to bottom by a patient. New Year’s Day 1920 was not auspicious: “More or less exactly at midnight, a patient tried to strangle himself.” The main treatments were daylong baths, which the patients liked, and sedatives, along with work therapy such as making paper bags or separating coffee beans; if a catatonic wanted to leave the assigned task “to stand against the wall,” he or she was free to do so. There was manual labor for those who could do it—gardening, carpentry, and bookbinding. The doctors ate their meals with their families. Olga often stayed in bed reading until noon or one o’clock; she sometimes did the cooking, less often when they eventually had the money to hire a maid. Hospital staff did the laundry. Hermann worked late.
His salary was still low, and the clinic was in desperate need of a third doctor—in 1916, Rorschach was personally responsible for 300 patients; later, for 320. But permission for an unpaid volunteer assistant was granted only in 1919; Rorschach himself was almost not hired, because Olga was a doctor and Koller was afraid that his superiors, who had steadily refused another hire, would think he was trying to present them with a fait accompli. An unmistakably irritated Rorschach wrote to Morgenthaler back in Bern:
As you can see from the long reading period I needed for the books you loaned me, I still have very little time for myself. I have just sent off an epic poem to the oversight committee, which, using copious statistical material—the Appenzeller’s locus minoris resistentiae [place of least resistance to invasion by toxins or bacteria]—proves that Herisau is in last place, far and wide, perhaps in all of Europe, re: number of doctors, and that the addition of a third doctor is simply indispensable. I have many votes in favor, but one member of the council apparently came to the bizarre conclusion that “we were artificially forcing up the number of patients so high in order to extort a third doctor.” What insight!
Rorschach had little in
tellectual stimulation. He helped found the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society and served as vice president, but the occasional meetings were hardly enough. “It’s too bad I live so far away, or we could have talked it over in person a long time ago,” he wrote to Morgenthaler about one topic; to another friend and colleague in Zurich: “Here in the provinces I get a glimpse of new publications only by accident, if at all.” While his friends said they were jealous of Herisau’s rural peace and quiet, Rorschach envied his colleagues who dealt with “interesting people, not like the Appenzellers here, worn smooth as pebbles in a riverbed.”
Rorschach could continue work on his earlier projects, especially his sect studies, and stay professionally connected to Switzerland’s other psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, at least by mail. But what would come next? Having promised Morgenthaler that he would collect patient drawings, Rorschach found it impossible to do so. He attributed the failure to cultural variation, writing regretfully to Morgenthaler that “if you put a piece of paper in front of a Bernese, he will start to draw after a while, without saying a word, but an Appenzeller will sit there in front of a blank sheet of paper and blab his head off about all the things one could draw there, without making a single mark!” Rorschach’s new patients were better at talking about pictures than making them.
The Inkblots Page 12