It can give a clear picture of the great problems of psychology and of psychopathology, and can throw light on them from new angles….It is well known what role was played by a simple child’s kite in the development of aviation. [Similarly,] the psychologist can prove with [the Rorschach test], search with it, almost play with it, while preparing for the difficult task of seeing the living man and his pathology as a whole and at the same time individually.
I am convinced that here lies a very important cultural mission for the Rorschach,…following in Rorschach’s personal tradition: nothing was further from his ideas than a wish to imprison man in a formula and reduce him to a mechanism that could be stamped according to measurable qualities. What he really was looking for was a picture of the man unencumbered by the veils of convention….I think that future research with the Rorschach test also needs this spirit of his, which did not want to schematize the living person, but which wanted, in spite of the schematizing and formalizing spirit of our time, to help us to look deeply into the great miracle of life.
The man was “unencumbered by the veils of convention” because interpreting the blots was a task for which there were no conventions, no norms, in everyday life. As Rorschach had written to his sister in 1908, “Social intercourse and lies and traditions and customs etc. are dams that block our view into real life.”
During the widespread turn to content analysis, one lone voice was calling for a turn to form. In a pair of articles from 1951 and 1953, psychologist and visual theorist Rudolf Arnheim reminded his readers that there were “objective perceptual characteristics of the blots as visual stimuli…in their own right.” A given response was more often than not at least partly “due to properties of the inkblots themselves rather than to the personal idiosyncrasies of the respondents.” In other words, it wasn’t all projection. In fact, Arnheim argued, the metaphor of “projection,” despite being visual, undervalued the act of seeing, of engaging with what was really there: “After paying lip service to the stimulus, we often talk as though the perceiver is hallucinating in a void,” projecting whatever his or her personality dictates rather than responding to the actual, specific image.
Even the Movement response, which Rorschach had tied to the projection-like concept of “feeling-in,” was not all subjective. An image can be more or less objectively dynamic, Arnheim pointed out. There is movement in some still images, such as a picture of a man turning his head, and not in others. These qualities were “no more ‘subjective’ than are shape or size.” The “obliquely oriented wedges” of Card I were inherently dynamic; the “bowing waiters” of Card III had swinging curves with objectively more energy than the “climbing bears” of Card VIII, which were “pathetically short of visual pep.”
Arnheim started to map out the inkblots’ visual properties in detail. The central white area in Card II (see this page) could easily be seen as a foreground figure “because of its symmetrical shape, convexity, and enclosedness,” but it also “combines equally well” with the outer white area to form a background to the black shape. These were objective visual qualities that determined a person’s range of responses. Arnheim spent close to ten pages on the complexities of Card I alone.
Arnheim speculated that there had never been such a visual analysis before because the Rorschach blots were widely considered to be “unstructured,” and responses to them “purely subjective.” He called this a “one-sided conception.” If the blots were both ambiguous and “structured enough to elicit some kind of reaction,” then surely some effort should be made to say what that structure was. In any case, the images were complex enough that Arnheim suggested using them to investigate directly the way people process visual information. For instance, a psychologist could ask people outright whether they saw Card I “as a combination of three vertical blocks or as a system of soaring diagonals,” instead of the roundabout detour of asking “What might this be?”
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After his essays in the early fifties, as Arnheim went on to become the most influential theorist to apply neuropsychology and cognitive science in studying art, he tended to dismiss the Rorschach test, precisely because most people continued to think of it as a purely subjective exercise in projection. Only one other writer on the Rorschach took up Arnheim’s call for specific visual analysis—and he too called into question the idea that the test was an exercise in “projection.”
Psychologist Ernest Schachtel (1903–75) was the closest thing there ever was to a philosopher of the Rorschach. He found both Beck and Klopfer too narrow in focus, calling Klopfer’s 1942 manual vague, self-contradictory, undertheorized, and ultimately cut off from “the totality of human experience.” The true goal of the inkblot experiment, Schachtel wrote, much as Bleuler would a decade later, was “adding to the understanding of the human psyche,” and while Rorschach himself “never loses sight of this aim, in Klopfer’s book it hardly ever comes into the field of the reader’s vision.”
In the debate about content analysis, Schachtel agreed examiners should use everything that turned up in the test situation. But he drew a distinction that ran deeper than the one between a formal response and a content-based response. What are the results of a Rorschach test, he asked: words that test takers say, or things that test takers see? Empiricists or literalists would say that we have access only to what test takers say out loud; we can’t, after all, read their minds. Schachtel’s view was that knowing what other people are seeing or feeling is something we do all the time and that, however hard it is to see through someone else’s eyes, this is what the psychologist has to do. The Rorschach, Schachtel wrote, analyzed perceptions and perceptual processes themselves, “not the words used to communicate these perceptions or part of them, although these too are often psychologically quite significant.” The point was what a person saw, and how, even if the examiner could access that way of seeing only by an unquantifiable process of imaginative empathy. Used merely to analyze spoken words, “the test will become a sterile technique rather than the ingenious instrument for the exploration of man as which it was conceived and presented by Rorschach.”
Although Schachtel never created a system of Rorschach scoring and interpretation—his insights were just the kind resistant to systematization—it was he who took up Arnheim’s 1951 call to give a detailed analysis of the inkblots as actual visual things, not mere screens to project onto. He analyzed the blots’ unity or fragmentation, solidity or fragility, massiveness or delicacy, stability or precariousness, hardness or softness, wetness or dryness, light or darkness, emphasizing all the while the psychological resonance of these qualities.
For instance, the size of an image was an objective fact, but the meaning of its size was a fact of psychology. “No miniature portrait,” he argued, “touches us with the power, profundity, and truly human quality” of an average-sized portrait by any great painter. To do so, an image had to be human scale, not literally life-sized but on “the scale within which the full range of human feelings can be spoken to and respond.” The inkblots, too, while not portraits, depended on the size of the cards for how they worked—one reason why the slide-show Group Rorschach was not as effective as the real thing.
Both Schachtel and Arnheim—who late in his career wrote an entire book on balance and symmetry, The Power of the Center—showed how discoveries in the science of perception since Rorschach’s day had backed up his insight that horizontal symmetry was crucial. For instance, vertical symmetry is less meaningful: most objects seem to change shape when we view them upside down, but not when we view them reversed. Adults reflexively turn upside-down pictures right-side up, but young children don’t—they haven’t yet learned spatial orientation, the fact that vertical is different from horizontal. A series of identical circles in a horizontal ring look the same size, and in a vertical ring they don’t—one reason why the moon looks bigger when it’s lower in the sky—but this difference does not exist for monkeys, who move through the world both horizontally a
nd vertically, nor for babies before they learn to stand upright. These aren’t laws of geometry; they are laws of human psychology.
It is only in retrospect that Schachtel, Arnheim, Bleuler, and Ellenberger, with their thoughtful reflections on the nature of the test and the life of its creator, stand out from the cypress knees, parlor games, and perfume ads. At the time, the inkblots were simply being used in too many ways, too many settings.
One of these uses, in Germany in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, was of self-evident importance. But it was largely kept secret for a generation: it raised too many questions that the postwar world, grappling with the horrors of the Holocaust, was not yet willing to face. Another Rorschach test given in Jerusalem in 1961, at one of the defining moments of the century, would finally bring those questions to light.
By 1945, the word Nazi—for a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—had become shorthand around the world for a cold-blooded sadistic monster beyond the pale of humanity. Six million Jews had been killed. How could any of the Nazis not have known? There was an overwhelming desire to stage The World v. The Nazis, with the defendants all guilty and deserving to die, but there was no clear legal basis for doing so. And the truth was that not all of the Holocaust’s perpetrators were party members, and vice versa. It was impossible, logistically and in principle, to condemn every single party member as a war criminal. The atrocities were unprecedented in human history, but for that very reason it was unclear what laws fit the crime.
The legal issues were resolved by negotiation among the Allies and by fiat. An international military tribunal was created. “Crimes against humanity” were prosecuted for the first time, at the Nuremberg Trials, beginning in 1945. Twenty-four prominent Nazis were chosen as the first group of defendants. But the moral quandaries remained. The defendants claimed that they had been following their own country’s laws, which in this case meant whatever Hitler wanted. Could people legally be held to account on the basis of a higher law of common humanity? How deep does cultural relativity go? And if these Nazis really were deranged psychopaths, then weren’t they unfit to stand trial, or even not guilty by reason of insanity? One Nuremberg defendant, Julius Streicher, was a virulent anti-Semite so obscenely perverted that he had been removed from power in 1939 and placed under house arrest by Hitler himself. In what sense was he responsible for war crimes?
The prisoners were held in solitary, on the ground floor of a three-story prison block with cells on both sides of a wide corridor. Each cell was nine by thirteen feet, with a wooden door several inches thick, a high barred window onto a courtyard, a steel cot, and a toilet, with no seat or cover, from which the prisoner’s feet remained visible to the guards. Personal belongings were kept on the floor. A fifteen-inch panel in the middle of the cell door was open at all times, forming a shelf in the cell on which meals were placed and a peephole for guards to look through, one guard per prisoner at all times. The light was always on, dimmer at night but still bright enough to read by, and heads and hands had to be kept visible while the prisoner was in bed, asleep or awake. Aside from harsh corrections when any rules were broken, the guards never spoke to the prisoners, nor did the wardens who brought them their food. They had fifteen minutes a day to walk outside, separate from the other prisoners, and showers once a week, under supervision. Up to four times a week, the prisoner was stripped and the room searched so thoroughly it took four hours to straighten up afterward.
They also had medical care, to keep them healthy for the trial. A staff of doctors weaned Hermann Göring off his morphine addiction, restored some of the use of Hans Frank’s hand after he had slashed his wrist in a suicide attempt, helped reduce Alfred Jodl’s back pain and Joachim von Ribbentrop’s neuralgia. There were dentists, chaplains—one Catholic, one Protestant—and a prison psychiatrist. This was none other than Douglas Kelley, coauthor of Bruno Klopfer’s 1942 manual, The Rorschach Technique.
Kelley had been one of the first members of the Rorschach Institute to volunteer after Pearl Harbor, and by 1944 he was chief of psychiatry for the European theater of operations. In 1945 he was in Nuremberg, assigned to help determine whether the defendants were competent to stand trial. He saw them for five months, making the rounds every day and talking to them at length, often sitting on the edge of a prisoner’s cot for three or four hours at a time. The Nazis, alone and bored, were eager to talk. Kelley said he had never had a group of patients so easy to interview. “In addition to careful medical and psychiatric examinations, I subjected the men to a series of psychological tests,” Kelley wrote. “The most important technique employed was the Rorschach Test, a well-known and highly useful method of personality study.”
Another American had free access to the prisoners: the Nuremberg morale officer, Gustave Gilbert. His job was to monitor prisoners’ moods and gather whatever intelligence he could. He visited them almost daily, chatted casually about whatever they felt like, then left the room and wrote it all down. He happened to have a background in psychology and gave himself the title of Prison Psychologist, apparently on no real authority. In the absence of a clear chain of command, the title stuck.
Kelley needed a translator to administer the tests; Gilbert had little experience in diagnostic testing, having studied social, not clinical, psychology, but he was the only American officer on the prison staff except the chaplains who spoke German. Plus he “could hardly wait to get to work on the Nazis.” Both he and Kelley knew that objective data on the personalities of these world-historical criminals were a gold mine, and both wanted to use the era’s most advanced psychological technique on the captive audience, to discover the secrets of the Nazi mind.
Before the trial started, Gilbert gave the prisoners IQ tests, adjusted to eliminate questions that required an American cultural background. Some of the Nazis bristled, and at least one probably faked mistakes to mislead Gilbert, who was Jewish. (Streicher, a former teacher, claimed not to be able to figure out 100 minus 72.) But most had a good time and welcomed the distraction. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, Hitler’s finance minister, found Gilbert’s visits “in part exhilarating”; Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Nazi Armed Forces, praised “how much better it was than the silly nonsense that German psychologists resorted to in the Wehrmacht testing station.” It was later discovered that Keitel had abolished intelligence tests in the army after his son had failed one. Hitler’s former vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, initially asked to be excused from the exercise but later came around, bragging about having placed third among the defendants (he was actually fifth). Several behaved like “bright and egotistical schoolboys”; Albert Speer said everyone “strove to do the best he could” and “see his abilities confirmed.”
Hermann Göring, creator of the Gestapo and the death camps, felt particularly up to the challenge. He understood psychological testing and had installed his cousin, Matthias Göring, as head of the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy; he loved being tested, especially with Gilbert’s flattery to grease the wheels. As Gilbert’s diary recorded for November 15, 1945, Göring
chuckled with glee as I showed surprise at his accomplishment….He could hardly contain himself for joy and swelled with pride. This pattern of rapport was maintained throughout the entire test, the examiner encouraging him with remarks of how few people are able to do the next problem, and Göring responding like a show-off schoolboy….
“Maybe you should have become a professor instead of a politician,” I suggested.
“Perhaps. I’m convinced that I would have done better than the average man no matter what I went into.”
When Göring failed the digit-span memory test at nine numbers—anything over seven numbers is above average—he begged Gilbert: “Oh, come on, give me another crack at it; I can do it!” He was livid when later told that two other prisoners had actually done better than him, at which point he changed his mind and decided the IQ tests were unreliable.
The distasteful fact was that the Nazis did well, with IQs ranging from Julius Streicher’s probably faked 106 to Schacht’s truly impressive age-adjusted 143. All but three of the twenty-one Nazis tested had scores above 120, “Superior” or “Very superior,” with nine being Mensa material, 130 or higher. Göring’s IQ of 138 showed, in Kelley’s words, “excellent intelligence bordering on the highest level.”
These findings were, to say the least, not widely reported. A 1946 New Yorker piece on Kelley was called “No Geniuses” and in it Kelley downplayed Göring’s intelligence more than he would elsewhere. The piece painted Kelley as “a lithe, agreeable chap in his early thirties, with a shock of brown hair and an authentically sardonic smile,” speaking in a patter of midcentury slang straight out of J. D. Salinger. He is quoted as saying that “with the exception of Dr. Ley,” who had committed suicide, “there wasn’t an insane Joe in the crowd. Nor did I find any geniuses. Göring, for example, came through with an I.Q. of a hundred and thirty-eight—he’s pretty good, but no wizard.”
In any case, IQ tests were never going to solve the mystery of the Nazi mind. “With but a short time in which to work,” Kelley wrote, “I took it upon myself to examine the personality patterns of these men” using the technique he had co-written the book on.
No one at Nuremberg had ordered Rorschachs. The test results were never used in the trial. Kelley and Gilbert simply decided, in the unprecedented, supercharged atmosphere of Nuremberg, to administer it themselves. The Rorschach, never as popular in Germany as in America, had been used under the Nazis but primarily in aptitude testing, or as evaluations to help “weed out disruptive social and ‘racial’ elements.” The Nazis had not generally been interested in psychological insight, except into other countries, to try to develop effective psychological warfare. Now the test would be used to gain insight into the Nazis themselves.
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