They might then have put down their magazine and gone to see The Dark Mirror, an Oscar-winning film noir starring Olivia de Havilland in a dual role as a pair of identical twins. The movie opened with credits rolling over inkblots and finished, after dozens of mirrors, symmetrical wallpaper patterns, and face-to-face scenes, with “The End” superimposed over another ominous inkblot. The movie’s psychiatrist hero used the Rorschach test, a word association test, a polygraph, and other ultramodern methods to discover which twin had committed the murder, while falling in love with the good one. Universal Pictures considered using the universal picture of an inkblot in print ads for the film, but in the end they went with a literal dark mirror, framing two Olivia de Havillands and the scrawled word “Twins!”
The evil twin taking the Rorschach (with modified inkblot) in The Dark Mirror: “It might be a mask.” The good twin sees “two people in costume, and they’re dancing around a maypole.” Credit 14
Hollywood was going dark. Two years to the day after its life-affirming 1945 cover photo of a returning sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square, Life magazine could look back on 1946 as “the midst of Hollywood’s profound postwar affection for morbid drama. From January through December deep shadows, clutching hands, exploding revolvers, sadistic villains and heroines tormented with deeply rooted diseases of the mind flashed across the screen in a panting display of psychoneurosis, unsublimated sex and murder most foul.” Film noir, the cinematic art of projecting psychological shadows in black and white, brought the violent and sexual undertones of the Rorschach test to life.
Noir and the inkblots shared more than a color scheme. Expressionism was another import from the German-speaking teens and early twenties, and another new way of making mental states visual. In film noir—“dreamlike, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel,” as it was defined in A Panorama of Film Noir, the first book on the genre—émigrés to Hollywood used the visual style of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and other Expressionist classics to tackle a disorienting new world. The plot of Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), often cited as the first film noir, turned on perception and interpretation: whether the key witness in a murder trial was right about what he thought he had seen. The archetypal characters of a film noir were the private eye looking for truth in a world of moral ambiguity, and the femme fatale, inscrutable personality under investigation. Literal Rorschach tests naturally became a staple of movie plots.
Film was not the only midcentury art suggestive of the Rorschach. In the twenties, inkblotty images had appeared in visual art by French and German Surrealists, who were interested in the unconscious as the source of dreams and automatic writing. But Surrealism was closer to Kerner’s klexography than to a Rorschach test. The Surrealists thought chance methods tempted the unconscious into view, like Kerner’s self-making blots tempted over from the other world. They denied or downplayed their own conscious role in creating the poems or images, while often paradoxically insisting on a specific interpretation: in 1920, when Francis Picabia made an asymmetrical ink splash on a splattered sheet of paper, he wrote the title, La Sainte Vierge (The Virgin Mary), right on the image.
The art that Americans came to associate with the Rorschach was less superficially like it than the Surrealists’ works, but worked more like how the inkblots worked—a new kind of painting that epitomized the culture of personality.
The Life headline about Jackson Pollock in 1949 was a rhetorical question: “Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” Pollock’s drip paintings were pure gushing outpourings of the self: “paroxysms of passion,” “ecstatic force,” such vivid self-expression that the movement was named Abstract Expressionism. “Most modern painters,” Pollock said, “work from within.” Hans Namuth’s photographs of Pollock in his studio—strewing paint, pouring sand, dripping and drizzling over a huge canvas covering the floor—were iconic, and they showed, even more clearly than the paintings, the artist in action: clad in black, cigarette dangling, performing his personality.
The paintings and the blots may have looked drastically different—in symmetry, color, rhythm, context, size—but they did similar things to the viewer (see this page). Combined with Pollock’s strong-silent-type cowboy persona and the postwar historical context of American superpower swagger, his art confronted viewers with a kind of imperious disdain: it provocatively didn’t care how you would react, it didn’t have an agenda about what you were supposed to see. At the same time, it engaged you, led your eyes around the dynamic canvas, often prompted you to step closer to or farther from the picture. Being confronted by a Rorschach image felt much the same way. It was around 1950, at the height of Pollock’s fame, that countless articles, satires, and cartoons about modern art began to take for granted the idea that such art was nothing but a Rorschach test.
The inkblots were also being used to spice up all sorts of lighter fare in popular culture. Advertisers found the Rorschach, with its mix of expertise and mystery, known and unknown, equally evocative in a man’s world of business and a woman’s world of pleasure. A blot superimposed on a stock market chart in 1955 suggested an investment company whose experts knew your idiosyncrasies better than you did: “There are many kinds of analyses…A. G. Becker & Co. will provide an incisive review of your portfolio, with your particular investment goals in mind. (By the way, can you state your immediate and long term investment goals?—if not, all the more reason to call on A. G. Becker & Co.)” Not that business expertise had to be boring: “There’s an original way of looking at everything,” and American Mutual offered “perhaps the most creative employee insurance program available.” Meanwhile, in a 1956–57 series of perfume ads, some featured a photograph of a woman with an inkblot, and explained: “You are what you want to be with Bal de Tete, the ultimate complement to your personality.” Others let the inkblot speak for itself.
Credit 15
Lowell Toy Manufacturing, publisher of family-friendly games based on TV shows (The Price Is Right, Groucho’s You Bet Your Life, Gunsmoke), aimed a bit lower when it put out an inkblot parlor game in 1957: PERSON-ALYSIS, “a revealing psychological game for adults based on the latest psycho-scientific testing techniques,” as the instruction book titillated. An ad in the New Yorker edged a little closer: “The newest in sophisticated parlor games,” PERSON-ALYSIS “gives participants hilarious, exciting, intimate and revealing ‘peeks’ into the private lives of friends and family…even themselves.” For a good time, moms and dads were turning to inkblots. Psychology meant Freud, and Freud meant sex, but Freudian ideas had no clear visual image associated with them. In the fifties, an inkblot was what the unconscious looked like, and after the Kinsey reports, published in 1948 and 1953, Americans were less embarrassed to admit what else it might look like.
In every corner of American culture, this was the Rorschach’s heyday. According to Google, we hit peak Rorschach in 1954. And as an actual test given by psychologists and psychiatrists, the Rorschach was the most popular in the world in the fifties and sixties. The inkblots were shown in hospitals, clinics, and guidance centers at least a million times a year in the United States alone, “as closely identified with the clinical psychologist as the stethoscope is with the physician.”
Usage of “Rorschach” in English, from Google Ngram Credit 16
They were used to study everyone and everything. One German dissertation used the Rorschach to confirm evidence published elsewhere that a woman’s psychology changes during menstruation. The author showed the inkblots to twenty of his female medical school colleagues, ages twenty-two to twenty-six, once during the month and once when they turned up again on the first day of their cycle. During their period, he found more sexual answers and Anatomical answers, slower response time, more fussy Small Detail answers, a more arbitrary approach overall. He couldn’t help but notice twice as many “blood” answers, and six times as many “fires,” “caves,” and “gates.” The menstruating women gave fewer Movement responses and fewer
answers on cards that tend to produce Movement responses, which meant repression: “mistrust of one’s own inner life.” More Color responses: they were highly “reactive to emotions.” Conclusion: psychologists Rorschach-testing women should factor in the menstrual cycle.
Anne Roe, a Harvard professor and clinical psychologist, turned the tables, using the Rorschach and TAT to investigate the psychology of scientists. She found, for instance, that social scientists gave more responses on Rorschach tests than natural scientists (an average of 67, as opposed to 22 from biologists and 34 from physicists), were more comfortable expressing aggression, and “were more concerned with—but also more bothered by—social relations.” Particularly interesting was her Rorschach test of behaviorist B. F. Skinner, who gave a staggering 196 responses, marked overall by “a contemptuous attitude toward other people.” He saw few humans and showed a “lack of respect for animals’ lives” as well—features that made a panel of experts, when told that the subject was a famous psychologist, speculate that it might be Skinner. He was also dismissive of the blots themselves, making remarks in his responses such as “The symmetry is a nuisance,” “Little stuff bothers me,” “Bad job of painting,” and “Not very well organized.”
Skinner had a history with projective methods. One Sunday morning in 1934, hard at work in his basement lab at Harvard, he had heard a sound from a machine through a wall—“Di-dah-di-di-dah, di-dah-di-di-dah”—and found himself saying in his head, over and over, “You’ll never get out. You’ll never get out.” This inspired him, not to spend more of his weekends outside the lab but to contact Henry Murray at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, who was busy developing the TAT. Skinner helped create the TAT and also created a test of his own, the Verbal Summator technique, that involved playing for subjects wordlike sounds he had collected and recorded, which he called “something like auditory inkblots.” Other psychologists briefly adopted this audio Rorschach.
In the 1950s, someone else tried to take projective methods across the final frontier of the senses. It seemed a shame to Edward F. Kerman, MD, that the blind were beyond the reach of these powerful methods, so he created the Kerman Cypress Knee Projective Technique, which involved putting six rubber replicas of cypress knees into subjects’ hands. (“The cypress knee,” he explained, “for the information of those unfamiliar with it, is an outgrowth from the roots of the cypress tree [Taxodium distichum] that has found its place in our culture as an ornamental object, appealing to the observer because of its inherent capacity to stimulate imaginative responses to its tortuous, ambiguous form.”) People were told to rank the rubber casts from favorite to least favorite, and say why; name or title each knee; tell a story using these six characters; then assign one knee the role of mother, make another the father, and another the child, and tell a story about those.
One blind eighteen-year-old high school student liked #5 best: “It kind of makes me think of one of these Grecian monsters or something that looks like it’s got numerous heads….Other than that I don’t know, I just like it.” He named it Avogadro, after the chemical law that says equal volumes of any gas at the same temperature and pressure have the same number of molecules. #4 was boring: “I don’t like anything real plain.” Dr. Kerman’s analysis reads like self-parody—“not meant to imply” that the young man “is to be considered clinically either as a psychopathic personality or an overt homosexual, but the tendency in these directions is there.” While remarking that the test’s validity had not actually been proven, Kerman ended on an upbeat note: “Since validation studies are necessary, the author invites interested workers in the field of projective technics to join him.”
Kerman’s kind of ham-fisted Freudianism was everywhere at midcentury. A new theory held that one of the Rorschach inkblots was the “Father Card,” another the “Mother Card,” and that any responses to them were especially significant for the person’s family psychodrama. If a woman said the arms on the Father Card looked “skinny and weak,” that was an ominous sign for her love life.
As clinical psychologists drifted further toward the second half of their “scientist-practitioner” mission, becoming less quantitative and more psychoanalytical, they started to feel that it was a shame to neglect the rich verbal material turning up in the course of a Rorschach test. Specific scores might be more rigorous, and proper scoring had earlier been recognized as a delicate and difficult task, requiring long training, fine sensitivity, even art. Now, in the words of one advocate for this approach, sticking to “the standpoint of rigorous objective analysis,” however “commendable,” would “appear to be inadequate so far as the needs of the psychiatrist are concerned.”
Robert Lindner, the popular psychologist whose nonfiction book Rebel Without a Cause would give the iconic movie its title, was one of the main champions of this approach to the Rorschach. He argued that “what the patient under Rorschach scrutiny produces is quite as important as how he produces it, and that occasionally it is more so.” Paying attention to the content “enormously enriches the value of the Rorschach protocol for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.” According to Lindner, forty-three specific responses had been found so far that were diagnostic in and of themselves. For instance, male subjects often saw the bottom center of Card I as a fleshy female torso, but homosexuals tended to see it as a muscular male torso. Bochner and Halpern had described what it meant to find a certain card “sinister”; Lindner called it the Suicide Card: “Responses containing such projections as ‘a decaying tooth,’ ‘a rotted tree trunk,’ ‘a pall of black smoke,’ ‘something rotten,’ ‘a burned and charred piece of wood’ appear in severe depressive states with suicidal overtones and self-annihilative thought content. Where the response to this area frankly mentions death, however, there is a fair prospect that the patient will benefit from electroshock therapy.”
Rorschach’s own stance on content analysis had been ambiguous. In 1920, he had rejected it; by 1922, he had shifted to the view that “the content of answers, too, can be meaningful.” Once the later lecture was included in Psychodiagnostics, both quotes were in the same book and proponents of either side of the debate could quote scripture in their favor.
Meanwhile, other psychologists started paying more attention to how subjects talked, irrespective of both content and formal scores. David Rapaport and Roy Schafer, the main figures in the midcentury psychoanalytic Rorschach, developed new codes for any Rorschach responses that simply sounded crazy: “Deviant Verbalizations,” further classified into “Peculiar Verbalizations” (“zebra skin, wouldn’t be—no spots on it”), “Queer Verbalizations” (“psychiatric experiments, surrealistic painting, soul burning out in hell”), “Autistic Logic” (“another fight that takes place in South Africa”), and a dozen other categories.
Behavior while taking a psychological test was still behavior; gibberish or violent fantasies during a Rorschach were as bad a sign there as in any other context. Why not interpret whatever turned up? And few would deny that “a pall of black smoke” together with other morbid answers suggested certain dark preoccupations. Yet much like Georg Roemer’s attempted shift to “a content-based, symbolic test” in the 1920s, the shift away from scoring Movement, Color, and the other formal qualities of people’s answers risked losing the unique value of the actual inkblots. Some felt it made the time and effort required to give a Rorschach test a bit pointless: anyone given to seeing “surrealistic painting, soul burning out in hell,” would probably bring up something along those lines if you just talked to them for five minutes. Proponents of content analysis or verbalization analysis always hedged with disclaimers: you had to proceed with great caution; these were just suggestions or guidelines; this merely supplemented traditional scoring, never replaced it. Then out came the answer key, and smoke meant this, a male or female torso meant that.
Whatever Rorschach’s intent, the content-based approach—the most seductive and Freudian but also the most controversial, prone to subjectivity a
nd misuse—was now a viable alternative to other, more sober Rorschach methodologies. It was also increasingly widespread in the popular imagination. Seeing a happy butterfly in a meadow is good, an ax murderer is bad. It was an idea easy to popularize.
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Amid the free-for-all of midcentury uses and abuses of the inkblots, a few more thoughtful figures stopped to look back on what had been learned and how far there still was to go. Rorschach had thought people went through an introvert turn at thirty-three to thirty-five, retreating into themselves to emerge charged with ideas and projects for the future. Coincidentally or not, the test “born” in late 1917 went through the same kind of reflective moment in the early 1950s.
This was when Henri Ellenberger tracked down Olga Rorschach and Hermann’s other surviving relatives, colleagues, and friends, writing the forty-page essay “The Life and Work of Hermann Rorschach,” published in 1954. Two years earlier, in the first issue of a new journal called Rorschachiana, Manfred Bleuler—Eugen’s son, the tester of Moroccan farmers, the second man to bring the inkblots to America—had published an essay looking back over thirty years of clinical use of the Rorschach.
He concluded, more modestly than many Americans writing on the test, that practical questions should never be decided by the Rorschach alone: it was not “by any means an infallible diagnostic instrument in the individual case.” It could never replace, only complement, talking to and observing the patient in everyday situations. But beyond its use in any individual case, Bleuler argued, the test’s significance was incalculable. “What the Rorschach test can do” (his italics) “is this”:
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