The experiment is very simple, so simple that at first it provokes head-shaking everywhere—interest and head-shaking, as you yourself have seen many times over. Its simplicity stands in the starkest possible contrast to the unbelievably rich perspectives it opens up. That is itself another reason to shake one’s head, and you can never take another person’s head-shaking amiss. Therefore, your dissertation has to be much more complete, precise, definite, and clear than something on another topic which doesn’t run these risks….I feel obliged to appeal to your feelings, and hope you will take to heart that one of the very best things a person can possess is the consciousness of having given the scientific arsenal something truly new.
Through this detour, Rorschach revealed how he felt about his own work.
Pressure of a different kind was coming from Georg Roemer, who had met Rorschach in December 1918 as a volunteer in the Herisau regional hospital and was the first volunteer assistant at the Krombach, from February to May 1919. Roemer worked in the school system in Germany and was pushing for the test’s adoption as a way to measure academic aptitude. Rorschach recognized that this would mean a significant intellectual triumph, and possibly real financial rewards, yet his reaction was cautious:
I too think the experiment might prove very successful as an aptitude test. But when I imagine some young person, who has maybe dreamed of going to university from an early age, being prevented from doing so as a result of failing at the experiment, I naturally feel a bit like I can’t breathe. Therefore, I have to say: the experiment may be suitable for such testing. But to decide whether or not it is, it would first have to be thoroughly investigated by academics using a very large sample, systematically, statistically, following all the rules of variance and factoring in correlations. I think when that happens, it will probably be possible to make a differentiated aptitude test. Not: doctor or not, lawyer or not, etc., but rather, if someone decides to be a doctor, should he go into theoretical or practical medicine, if a lawyer, should he be a business lawyer or a defense attorney, etc. etc….
Also, the experiment would surely need to be combined with other tests….
Above all, the theoretical basis of the experiment would have to be established much more thoroughly, because it is wrong to take such decisive measures based on a test without an extremely solid theoretical foundation….
Also, Dr. Behn’s dissertation shows that one mustn’t apply this test too early—fifteen- to sixteen-year-old boys, for example, have conspicuously poor results…and further studies of seventeen- to twenty-year-olds, perhaps older subjects as well, are needed to determine when their results stabilize at an adult level….All this needs extensive work.
With Roemer chomping at the bit—even making inkblot series of his own in secret—Rorschach here insisted on due diligence and in the process anticipated most of the objections that his test would face in the century to come. He would acknowledge elsewhere that “the subject being taken unawares in the experiment is the basis for serious objection,” especially if the test had real consequences: that would be like tricking people to testify against themselves. Still, he hoped the test would be used for the forces of good: “May the test discover more true latent talents than misguided careers and illusions; may it free more people from the fear of psychosis than it burdens with such fears; may it give more ease than hardship!”
Roemer deluged Rorschach with letters for years, prompting long responses about the theory behind the inkblot experiment and its relation to Jung, Freud, and Bleuler, and various other thinkers. Rorschach developed both new ideas and ones he had kept out of his book for simplicity’s sake or because they weren’t fully worked out; Roemer would later claim credit for them. Many of Hermann’s late nights typing, the cause of his fights with Olga, were spent writing his lengthy replies to Roemer’s questions. But Rorschach encouraged him: “I find your questions extremely interesting, please keep them coming.”
The younger colleague he grew closest to was from outside his field. Martha Schwarz was a volunteer doctor at Herisau for seven months. Her dissertation had specialized in cremation—a far cry from psychiatry—but she was a cultured person, having hesitated for a long time between medicine and literature. Rorschach recognized her broad interests and not only gave her tips about adjusting to Herisau but soon started giving her psychiatric work to do; he tested her with the inkblots, and before long she was administering tests for him. He called one of them “one of the most interesting findings I have ever had” and seems to have used it as Case 1 in his book. She also did very thorough physical exams of the patients, something usually neglected at the time, and told Rorschach: “You know, a doctor has a completely different relationship to patients if he knows the patient’s body.”
Another student, Albert Furrer, who learned the test from Rorschach in the spring of 1921, began testing army sharpshooters. Rorschach could see the humor of the situation: “Someone I know is running the experiment in the barracks here in Herisau, testing very good and very bad marksmen!!! Such a test-hungry time we live in!” But it made sense to give sharpshooters a test of perception—how they see details, how they scan an ambiguous visual field, the degree to which they impose an interpretation on what they perceive. An elite marksman needed the ability to control his affect—suppress any physical reaction to feelings or emotions—and when Furrer tested Konrad Stäheli, a world-champion marksman (forty-four individual medals and sixty-nine total medals in world championships, including three golds and a bronze at the 1900 Olympics), his results showed this control to a truly dramatic degree. There were other findings, too: Rorschach’s review of the soldiers’ results made him realize “how strongly military service changes a person’s Experience Type, suppressing the M and promoting the C,” which “awakened some doubts about my view that the Experience Type is relatively constant.” Still, Rorschach sighed, “The fact that talents were the first things to be tested, marksmanship no less, really is somewhat comical.”
None of these spinoffs would matter so much if he could finally get the test published. But even as publishers balked, Rorschach was coming to appreciate the unique value of his own set of images and realizing that he needed to insist they be published, in color and in full. “The point is not to illustrate the book but to make it possible for anyone interested in the work to conduct experiments with these images….and it is extremely important that they be with my images.”
Earlier, he had modestly invited readers to make their own, and had encouraged both Behn-Eschenburg and Roemer to make series of inkblots, but theirs didn’t work. Emil Lüthy was the only one he continued to encourage, but Lüthy gave up—as a real artist, he recognized that making inkblots truly suggestive of both form and movement was much harder than it looked. Rorschach had accomplished something impossible to replicate, and eventually he owned up to the fact: “Trying the experiment with new plates might take a lot of work; clearly the relationship between Movement and Color reactions in my series works especially well, and is not so easy to re-create after all.”
Even after his 1918 essay and 1919 lectures, he was unable to write his final manuscript until he knew whether the book would be for a psychiatric, educational, or popular audience, and whether he would be able to publish it with images, full-sized or reduced or not at all. He turned for help to pastor and psychoanalyst Oskar Pfister, the cofounder of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society who was also encouraging Rorschach to publish a short, popular version of his sect studies. When the publisher that Pfister recommended fell through as well, it was Rorschach’s colleague from the Waldau, Walter Morgenthaler, who found a home for the book at last: with Morgenthaler’s own publisher, Ernst Bircher.
By that time, the dam was full to bursting. Rorschach had outlined the book’s structure in a letter to Morgenthaler four days earlier, and he wrote it fast—267 handwritten pages, a 280-page typewritten draft, between April and June of 1920, during “the long wet Herisau spring.”
In late 1919, h
e had mused that ages thirty-three to thirty-five were “years of an all but certain disposition for deep introversion”—a time in life when people turn inward, dig deep. He mentioned Christ and Buddha and Augustine, all turning away from the world at thirty-three, along with the Swiss sect founders he had studied, Binggeli and Unternährer, both of whom had had their mystical visions at just that age. “In the Gnostic tradition,” he noted, “man is ready for a true inward turn only when he turns thirty-three.” It would not have escaped him that his own years thirty-three to thirty-five spanned late 1917 to 1920, just when he was developing the inkblot test. That phase was coming to an end, and it was time to make an outward mark in the world.
Yet months went by without Rorschach hearing whether Bircher could print the plates after all, then more months of contract negotiations, and more months of waiting after the contract was signed, with Rorschach expecting the book to come out any day. Bircher’s first letter to Rorschach had been addressed to “Dr. O. Rohrbach”—not a good sign. Rorschach wrote to his brother in Brazil, saying how much he needed practical advice from a businessman, but to no avail.
Long after the contracted publication date, Bircher wrote to say that Rorschach’s book might have to be published in a different font from the other books in the series, since Morgenthaler’s volume was still being printed and the metal type was thus still in use. In other words, Bircher hadn’t even started yet. Rorschach could sue, but that would only delay everything further. Two months later, Bircher said that there were so many capital “F”s in Rorschach’s book that the printers had run out. (“F” is less common in German than in English, but Rorschach’s book was full of them: “Form” is abbreviated “F,” and “Color” in German is Farbe, abbreviated “Fb.”) The first section of Rorschach’s book would have to be printed at last for that reason alone: to free up the type.
All this delayed Rorschach’s research as well, because while the inkblots were at the publisher, and the lithography firm, and the printer, neither he nor his colleagues had images to use. Just when he had access to a growing range of private patients, and colleagues who could supply protocols for blind diagnosis, his data collection was stopped in its tracks. He made do with sets of “parallel series” where he could, but needed to use the real inkblots in most cases, so his letters from the period are filled with pleas to return his one and only set. Despite begging the publisher to print the images sooner, or at least send him proofs, he didn’t get a set until April 1921, and that with errors; no acceptable images arrived until May 1921.
Rorschach’s letters to Bircher during the printing process reveal many aspects of the test Rorschach found important. One letter explained that if the image sizes had to be reduced, the arrangement of shapes in the overall space of the card had to exactly correspond to the relationships in the originals, because “images that do not satisfy these conditions of spatial rhythm are rejected by a large number of test subjects.” Even the tiny spatters of ink on the edges of the shapes had to be included, because “there are test subjects who tend to interpret primarily these tiny details, a quality with great diagnostic significance.” This was also where Rorschach insisted that there be no numbering on the front of the cards, because “the least sign of intentionality, even a number, is enough to adversely affect many mentally ill test subjects.” In correcting proofs, he remarked that a certain dark-blue color was too weak, and that the reproductions needed to show “the tiniest dissolvings of the paint and the ink”; he rejected another page with the comment: “No stippling that affects the outline too strongly.”
Top: Postproduction: Rorschach’s notes on the printer’s proofs, editing out the extra shapes to make the bat of Card V—“Leave out the crossed-out smaller shapes; center the large bat-shape in the rectangle. Otherwise good to print. Dr. Rorschach.” Bottom: The final Card V.
It is impossible to know how much the delays with Bircher were directly or indirectly Morgenthaler’s fault, but he often gave Rorschach advice that showed a certain lack of understanding, for instance encouraging him to publish the images at reduced size. And for better or worse, when Rorschach wanted to give his major work the not exactly catchy title Method and Results of an Experiment in Perception-Diagnosis (Interpretation of Chance Forms), it was Morgenthaler who talked him out of it. The inkblots were “more than a mere experiment,” Morgenthaler argued in August 1920, and were about “far more than just perception-diagnosis.” His suggestion: Psychodiagnostics.
Rorschach refused at first. Such a sweeping term would “go too far, it seems to me”; diagnosing the psyche sounded “almost mystical,” especially at this early stage before extensive control experiments with normal subjects. “I would rather say too little at the outset than too much,” he demurred, “and not just out of modesty.” When Morgenthaler insisted he had to jazz up the title—no one would spend good money for “an experiment in perception-diagnosis”—Rorschach “unhappily” gave in, though he continued to think the new title sounded “extremely arrogant,” and he used his original long, prosaic description as the subtitle. Maybe Morgenthaler was right and the book needed better marketing, but Rorschach didn’t want to sound like a huckster.
—
Psychodiagnostics was published in mid-June 1921 in an edition of 1,200 copies. Rorschach’s friend Emil Oberholzer had been the first to read the manuscript, and his response was immensely encouraging, especially to someone working outside a university setting and without official support: “I think that this research and your results are the most important findings since Freud’s publications….In psychoanalysis, the formal categories have long since been seen as inadequate, for partly intrinsic reasons, and in any case new methods are what bring progress. And every productive breakthrough is invariably amazingly simple.” Oskar Pfister, who had tried to get both the book and Rorschach’s sect work into print, sent another gratifying response. With its extended metaphor of Rorschach’s books as his children, his letter is written with the slightly huffing-and-puffing bonhomie characteristic of the good pastor but glows with admiration:
Dear Doctor,
Having been able to render obstetrical service at the entrance into the world of your little newborn boy, I have already come to love him. He is a vigorous, bright-eyed little fellow indeed, of a rare parentage, learned and unrattling, able to see through things both originally and profoundly. Faced with facts and unlike the compulsive neurotic theories, it is pure humanity itself, without pompous mannerisms or bombastic self-importance. The little fellow will be much talked about, and will secure attention from the large academic world for his father, who had long since earned it. My deepest, most heartfelt thanks for this precious gift, and I hope his little sister with her knowledge of the sects will pay me a visit soon too! Affectionately yours, Pfister.
After all the delays, the inkblots were out in the world. Roemer, now the head of business and career counseling for a German student organization, brought back a mountain of protocols from the organization’s big shots, whose conformity amused Rorschach: “All of them future ministers, politicians, and organizers, so to speak. Every shade of the spectrum from the blandest bureaucrats to the feistiest Napoleons. And every last one of them—extravert. They must have to be, in politics?!” Roemer indefatigably tested shell-shocked ex-soldiers and pensioners adapting poorly to retirement; he had plans to test Albert Einstein that winter, and the famous World War I general Erich Ludendorff, even the heads of the Weimar Republic.
Early responses to the test were largely positive. At Rorschach’s first conference presentation of the test after publication, in November 1921, Bleuler stood up in a discussion session to declare that he had confirmed Rorschach’s approach with both patients and nonpatients. Rorschach walked up to Morgenthaler afterward, beaming: “Well, it’s made it—we’re out of the woods now!” As he saw it: “Bleuler has now expressed himself publicly and quite clearly for the value of the method. Several reviews have appeared, until now all good, only too good;
I would like an occasional controversy, since I have so little opportunity for a verbal one.” Anything would be better than his solitary work in Herisau.
Controversy would come soon enough. After a few reviews in psychology journals that were largely summaries, the first one that went into most detail was decidedly double-edged. Arthur Kronfeld’s 1922 review opened by calling Rorschach “a resourceful spirit, a psychologist with fine intuition but truly limited experimental/methodological precision.” He found Rorschach’s insights into character and perception utterly convincing. But Rorschach’s numerical approach to scoring the test was “necessarily too crude and approximate,” while Rorschach’s interpretations went far beyond the actual test results, however mightily he tried to “squeeze” his findings out of people’s answers. The test was both too quantitative and too subjective. Ludwig Binswanger, an important pioneer of what would be known as existential psychology, who knew Rorschach, praised his work more highly—as clear, insightful, objective, meticulous, original. But he also strongly criticized its lack of theoretical underpinning, a lack Rorschach himself felt deeply. Eventually it would not be enough to argue that the inkblots worked without explaining how and why.
In the world of German academic psychology, the test had already met with blanket rejection. In April 1921, at the first convention of the German Society of Experimental Psychology after the war, Roemer had given a lecture on the inkblot test—as modified by him, using his own blots, intended for educational testing. The powerful and popular William Stern, who a generation earlier had been one of the first academic psychologists to review Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (he hated it), stood up to say that no single test could ever grasp or diagnose the human personality. Rorschach’s—actually Roemer’s—“approach was artificial and one-sided, his interpretations arbitrary, his statistics insufficient.” Rorschach himself had never claimed that his test should be used in isolation, as Roemer knew from their correspondence, and he was deeply annoyed that Roemer had acted as his spokesman, “proposing unnecessary modifications before my book has even been published.” He asked Roemer to back off: “Multiple different series of inkblots can only lead to confusion! And especially with Stern!!!” Even Stern became “more approachable” once he had read a copy of Rorschach’s actual book, Rorschach thought, but the damage was done, and the inkblot test never gained wide acceptance in Germany.
The Inkblots Page 17