The Inkblots

by Damion Searls

  Rorschach was already looking beyond Europe, though. A Chilean doctor volunteering at Herisau was planning to translate Psychodiagnostics into Spanish, but Rorschach knew that “North America would obviously be much more significant. They are almost as interested in depth psychology there as in vocational aptitude testing.” Freud, Rorschach went on, was “doing practically nothing in Vienna anymore besides giving ‘teaching analyses’ to Americans” who wanted to go into practice. “Naturally it would be very advantageous if the Americans took up the thing.” Meanwhile, “both the English Psychoanalytic Journal and American psychoanalytic journals are planning long reviews.”

  Finally, Rorschach wanted to use the inkblot experiment in the service of the anthropological interests most apparent in his sect work. In Psychodiagnostics, the only racial or ethnic difference he had had material to generalize about was that between the introverted Bernese Swiss, slow of speech and good at drawing, and the extraverted, witty, more physically active Appenzellers (fewer M’s, more C’s). But he continued to follow ethnographic and sect-related research, reviewing it for Freud’s journal, and he and Oberholzer discussed the prospect of testing Chinese populations. He talked his way into Albert Schweitzer’s hotel room after a lecture and tested him—“one of the most rationalistic profiles” and “the wildest case of color repression” Rorschach ever saw—after which Schweitzer apparently agreed to have Africans in his missionary communities Rorschach-tested by a fellow African.

  “There is a lot more still in the experiment,” Rorschach wrote in a long letter to Roemer on the day the publisher mailed him his book at last, “not to mention the question of a more or less acceptable theoretical underpinning. And surely there are other factors hidden in the results that have just as rigorous a value, it’s just up to us to find them.”

  By the time Psychodiagnostics was published in 1921, the book was not only preliminary but already a year out of date—a particular freeze-frame of Rorschach’s thought from spring 1920. It would have been a very different work if written a year or two earlier or later. But one thing about it was undeniably lasting. It was published in two parts: the book and a separate box containing the inkblots. At first the images were on sheets of paper, for the purchaser to mount; in later editions, the images would be printed directly on cardboard cards. They were the same ten blots that are still used today.

  Rorschach was gradually building up a private practice in Herisau, giving one or two hours of psychoanalysis a day to clients with a range of issues and complexes. One patient, “impulsive and childish, even though he’s over forty,” almost made Rorschach wonder if it was worth it: “I’ll never take on a neurotic like that again, he can practically devour you.”

  This was a colleague who had taken the inkblot test and found the experience powerful enough that he had asked Rorschach to accept him for therapy. Rorschach reluctantly agreed to a four-week trial period, but, he wrote, “I should have paid more attention to my experiment”:

  The patient interpreted the red animal on Card VIII as “Europa, on the bull carrying her over the Bosphorus.” That he confabulated Europa from the bull shape is already a strong sign; that there are two Color responses in his answer is an even stronger one—[the Bosphorus Strait refers to the blue, and] the “bull” is for him the reddest passion. But I had no idea at the time that a whole array of determining content was important in his answer, I realized it only later. The bull is the man himself, and there are masochistic fantasies at play, a sense of victimization, and the most insane delusions of grandeur: he is “carrying all of Europe on his back,” it’s all in there. Well, at least in this regard I’ve learned something.

  In using the inkblot test on a wider range of people, he was starting to move away from what he had written in Psychodiagnostics: that the test “does not plumb the unconscious.” He was coming to think that what people saw in the blots, not just how they saw, could be revealing: “The content of answers, too, can be meaningful.”

  Rorschach seems to have realized that if he wanted his insights to be part of the main line of twentieth-century thinking about psychology, he needed to lay out the connections between the inkblot experiment and psychoanalysis. Bringing the two together would give the test at least something of a theoretical underpinning, while also extending its significance beyond his idiosyncratic “psychodiagnostics,” and it would enrich Freudian thought with new formal and visual insights.

  Models of the mind like Freud’s model are known as “dynamic psychiatry” because they focus on emotional processes and mental mechanisms, the underlying “movements” of the mind, rather than observable symptoms and behavior. By 1922, Hermann Rorschach was practicing a truly dynamic psychiatry, tracing the subtle movements of a perceiving mind. He had mastered his instrument.

  That year, Rorschach set one of these virtuosic performances down on paper. Oberholzer had sent him a protocol for blind diagnosis, telling him only the patient’s sex and age (male, forty). Rorschach’s analysis, written up as a lecture for the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society titled “The Form Interpretation Test Applied to Psychoanalysis,” first moved through the patient’s protocol in great detail for twenty pages, giving advice about how to code each response and how to go about reaching an interpretation. This advice was hardly easy to follow, since Rorschach was finely attuned to how the rhythms of a patient’s answers revealed their approach to the world: what they paid attention to, what they ignored, what they repressed, how they moved. He demanded a certain balanced rhythm in his own analysis, too: “Hitherto we have paid too much attention to the introverted features in our patient and have neglected the extraverted side.”

  Oberholzer’s patient had given Movement responses later than usual in the sequence of ten cards. Therefore, Rorschach concluded, the man had a capacity for empathy (he could give M responses) but was neurotically suppressing it (he initially avoided M responses, even on cards that were conducive to them). The patient’s initially bold and vigorous Color responses were followed by equivocal ones, which to Rorschach indicated a conscious struggle to control his own emotional reactions, rather than unconscious repression of them. Rorschach also noticed that the man’s first answers to each card were unoriginal and often vague but that he eventually arrived at genuinely original, “definite and convincing” responses. In Card II he saw “Two clowns,” then “But it may also be a wide parkway lined by beautiful dark trees,” then “Here’s red: it’s a well of fire giving off smoke.” This was someone who “reasoned inductively better than deductively, concretely better than abstractly,” and kept trying until he found something he was satisfied with. At the same time, the man never seemed to notice common, normal Details, indicating that he lacked basic adaptability, “the quick wit of the practical man who can grasp the essentials and master any situation.”

  The key to the man’s psychology was that he constantly looked to the middle of the cards. On Card III, he saw what many people see—two men with top hats bowing to each other—but then added: “It is as though that red thing in the middle were a power separating the two sides, preventing them from meeting.” Another card “gives me on the whole the impression of something powerful in the middle to which everything else clings.” Another: “This white line in the middle is interesting; it is a line of force around which everything else is arranged.” These responses, while impossible to classify, were at the core of Rorschach’s interpretation. He not only noticed the pattern but dug into it—what was the relationship with the midline in each answer? Did the center hold on to the other parts, or did the surrounding parts grasp the center?

  The patient was an introverted neurotic, Rorschach concluded, probably with obsessive-compulsive behaviors, and tormented by ideas of inadequacy and self-distrust; it was these feelings that made him control his emotions so firmly.

  This patient typically nags at himself, dissatisfied with his accomplishments; he is easily thrown off balance, but then recovers, because of his need to apply himself.
He has little full, free emotional rapport with the world around him, and shows a rather strong tendency to go his own way. His dominant mood, his habitual underlying affect, is rather anxious, depressed, and passively resigned, though all this can be and is controlled wherever possible, due to his good intellectual capacity and adaptability.

  His intelligence is, on the whole, good, keen, original, more concrete than abstract, more inductive than deductive. Still, there is a contradiction here, in that the subject exhibits a rather weak sense for the obvious and the practical. He thus gets stuck on and trapped in trifling and subordinate details. Emotional and intellectual self-discipline and mastery are apparent, however.

  All this from the inkblots. Oberholzer confirmed both Rorschach’s specific descriptions of the patient’s personality and his larger speculations: the patient’s relation to the “central line of power,” for example, matched what analysis had revealed about his relation to his father. “I could not have given a better characterization of the patient myself, even though I had him under analysis for months,” Oberholzer wrote.

  Rorschach’s 1922 essay went on to propose how his trinity of Form, Movement, and Color might be integrated with Freudian theory. Which kinds of answers shed light on the unconscious? Rorschach argued that Form responses showed conscious powers at work: accuracy, clarity, attention, concentration. Movement responses, on the other hand, furnished “a deep insight into the unconscious,” as did Color responses in a different way. Abstract answers, like “Something powerful in the middle,” emerged from deep in the person’s psychology, much like the manifest content of dreams, which can reveal the inner workings of the mind when interpreted and analyzed properly.

  In other words, it did make a difference “whether a patient interprets the red part of a card as an open wound or sees it as rose petals, syrup, or slices of ham.” But there was no formula for how much difference it made—“how much the content of such interpretations belongs to the conscious and how much to the unconscious.” Sometimes a splash of blood is just a splash of blood. And sometimes Europa on a bull was not just Europa on a bull. Rorschach insisted that the significance of the content was “determined primarily by relationships which exist between formal properties and content”—the prevalence of Movement or Color, Whole or Detail, answers responding to one or another part of the visual field. Rorschach suspected another patient of having “ideas of remaking the world” not simply because the man saw gigantic gods in the inkblots, but because he “gave several abstract interpretations in which the center line and middle of the image prompted responses that are variations of the same theme.”

  No one else who used the test brought form and content together the way Rorschach did. Georg Roemer, for example, felt that “the Rorschach test must be liberated from its formal rigidity and reconstructed as a content-based, symbolic test.” He made several series of his own images—the “more complicated and structured, more pleasing and aesthetically refined” kind that Rorschach specifically rejected (see this page)—but while Rorschach granted that they were valuable to a certain extent, he insisted that they were no substitute for the real thing:

  My images look clumsy next to yours, but I had to make them that way, after being forced to discard many earlier images that were less useful….It is really too bad you did not gather data with my cards. It just doesn’t work to simply assume the M possibilities of my cards are double those of yours, or what have you. There are so many nuances….There is no way around testing with my series first, to get a secure foundation of the Experience Type and the number of M and C responses. Afterwards, a test with your series would feel like an aesthetic relief, so to speak, and probably be more revealing of complexes.

  In other words, Roemer’s “content-based, symbolic test” would be much like Freudian free association, with the psychiatrist able to pay attention to what people said, irrespective of the visual, formal properties of the inkblots. People could free-associate to Roemer’s images just as they could to anything else. But if Rorschach wanted free associations from his patients, he could just talk to them. If he wanted to uncover unconscious complexes, he could give a word association test. The ten inkblots, with their unique balance of movement, color, and form, did more; Roemer’s blots, notably lacking in movement, did not.

  First and last, what mattered in Rorschach’s dynamic psychiatry was movement. In his 1922 essay, he described his ideal of mental health in explicitly dynamic terms: “a free mixing of Movement, Form, and Color responses appears to be characteristic of people who are free of ‘complexes.’ ” Again: “The essential thing is a quick transition from Movement to Color, as motley a mix as possible of intuitive, combinatory, constructed, and abstracted interpretations of the whole, easily plucking the first colored flower and then returning as quickly as possible to movements…and playful or at least easy diction, welcoming all these things with as it were open arms.”

  Rorschach even pointed out that insights are dynamic. To have an insight, a person needs “to both have the intuition and then grasp and hold it as a whole; that is to say, he must be able to shift quickly from expansiveness to constriction” (emphasis added). Without focus, any flash of intuition would remain “sketchy, aphoristic, a castle in the air impossible to adapt to real life”; an overly rational or rigid personality paralyzes intuition altogether. These well-known truths were “obviously no new contribution,” Rorschach remarked. “What is new is that we can follow the conflict between repressing conscious and repressed unconscious by means of the test,” seeing in action how a patient’s compulsive hypercriticism stifled his productive intuitions and free inner life. The inkblot test gave more than static results—it let Rorschach track the dynamic processes of the mind.

  —

  His own inimitable interpretations, along with the ham-fisted efforts by followers such as Behn-Eschenburg and Roemer, must have made Rorschach wonder if anyone else would be able to use the inkblots properly. At the same time, a major new work by Carl Jung left him no choice but to confront head-on how his own vision could be generalized to a universally applicable test—or not.

  Jung’s Psychological Types, published in 1921 a month before Psychodiagnostics, posited two basic human attitudes, introversion and extraversion. Jung added four main psychological functions: judging the world through thinking versus feeling, and perceiving the world through sensation versus intuition. These categories may sound familiar—Jung’s approach would later be popularized as the Myers-Briggs test. Questions of how we judge and perceive the world were also, obviously, central to the inkblot experiment. But the significance of Jung’s Psychological Types for Rorschach ran deeper than that.

  Jung had been writing about introversion and extraversion since 1911, and while Rorschach had adopted and modified the terms for the inkblot test, Jung’s ideas had been changing too. After reading Psychological Types, Rorschach complained that “Jung is now on his fourth version of introversion—any time he writes anything, the concept changes again!” In the end, their definitions converged, and Rorschach’s statement in Psychodiagnostics that his concept of introversion had “hardly anything in common with Jung’s except the name” was misleading, because it referred only to the versions of Jung’s theory published before 1920, when Rorschach was writing his book.

  Like Rorschach, Jung rejected static pigeonholing and insisted that real people are always a mix of types. Jung described how parts of the self compensated for other parts—consciously introverted or thinking types, for instance, would have an unconscious marked by extraversion or feeling. In long, insightful descriptions of real-world interactions, he showed how people of one type behave in ways that are interpreted or misinterpreted by others through the lens of their own types. Jung’s categories were not meant to label behavior but to help understand the complexity of real human situations.

  The bottom line, though, was that people are different. When Jung was asked why he had said there were four types, precisely these f
our, each in extraverted or introverted form, he said that the schema was the result of many years of personal, psychiatric experience: that’s just the way people are.

  The problem, Jung wrote in the epilogue to Psychological Types, was that any theory of the mind “presupposes a uniform human psychology, just as scientific theories in general presuppose that nature is fundamentally one and the same.” Unfortunately, it’s just not true: there is no uniform human psychology. After referring to “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” and alluding to socialism and the Communist Revolution in Russia—allusions that certainly attracted Rorschach’s notice—Jung raised the decisive objection that equal opportunity for all, equal liberty, equal income, even total justice of every kind would make some people happy and other people unhappy. If I ran the world, should I give Mr. X twice as much money as Mr. Y, since money means so much more to him? Or not, since the principle of equality matters to Mr. Z? What about people who need to put other people down to feel good about themselves—how should their needs be satisfied? Nothing we legislate “will ever be able to overcome the psychological differences between men.” So too in science, and in any difference of opinion: “The partisans of either side attack each other purely externally, always seeking out the chinks in their opponent’s armor. Squabbles of this kind are usually fruitless. It would be of considerably greater value if the dispute were transferred to the psychological realm, from which it arose in the first place. The shift of position would soon show a diversity of psychological attitudes, each with its own right to existence.” Every worldview “depends on a personal psychological premise.” No theorist “realizes that the psychology he sees is his psychology, and on top of that is the psychology of his type. He therefore supposes that there can be only one true explanation…namely the one that agrees with his type. All other views—I might almost say all seven other views—which, in their way, are just as true as his, are for him mere aberrations” for which he feels “a lively but very understandable distaste.”