Starting in July 1961, American volunteers in a “teaching exercise” operated a device that delivered what they thought were extremely painful shocks to “learners” in another room. The whole thing was staged, but these volunteers, when verbally ordered by the experimenter, administered what they thought were real electric shocks, up to and including 450-volt blasts labeled “Danger: Severe Shock,” even after the screams audible from the next room fell ominously silent. They told the experimenter it was wrong, and that they didn’t want to do it, but they did it anyway. To find monsters willing to just follow orders, it seemed we needed only to look in the mirror.
Arendt’s book and Milgram’s study were both published in 1963. Their lines of argument were very different—the philosopher calling into question the meaning of personal responsibility, the experimenter showing how easy it was to compel obedience in a specific situation—but they were soon impossible to disentangle. Milgram made Arendt’s reflections concrete; Arendt gave Milgram’s scenario world-historical resonance. The submissive volunteers electrocuting people seemed even more horrifying given their association with Eichmann; Milgram’s image of conformity overriding moral values made people read Arendt as claiming Eichmann had been forced to “just follow orders,” even though she never said he was an unwilling follower.
Arendt had mischaracterized Eichmann’s actual Rorschach testing—writing that “half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as ‘normal’ ” when in fact he was examined only by Kulcsar, who found him deranged. Her point was to scathingly dismiss “the comedy of the soul experts” altogether. And her overall philosophical argument, about what individual responsibility can mean when actions are explained by general laws, went far beyond what any test could possibly prove or refute. And yet, in a broader sense, Arendt—at least Arendt in conjunction with Milgram—was a key figure in the history of the Rorschach test. Her views, or how they were understood, took the relativism implicit in the test to its radical conclusion.
Arendt and Milgram also eventually made it possible to grapple with the Nuremberg Rorschachs. It was Molly Harrower—the organizer of the 1948 conference that had failed to publicize the results—who returned to Gilbert’s protocols, though not until 1975, when asked to address an academic seminar on American civilization. She explicitly said that the reason she and her profession had previously “espoused a concept of evil which dealt in black and white, sheep and goats,” was because “we had not been challenged by such startling and unpopular ideas as those of Arendt and Milgram.”
Harrower had the Nuremberg protocols reanalyzed blind, with non-Nazi results as controls. The results confirmed Kelley’s view that the Nazis were normal, or abnormal in typical ways: “It is an oversimplified position to look for an underlying common denominator in the Rorschach records of the Nazi prisoners,” Harrower concluded. “The Nazis who went on trial at Nuremberg were as diverse a group as one might find in our government today, or for that matter, in the leadership of the PTA.”
Also in 1975, the first book to specifically quote and analyze the Nazi Rorschachs was published: The Nuremberg Mind: The Psychology of Nazi Leaders, by Florence R. Miale (one of the experts who had backed out of the 1948 conference) and Michael Selzer, a political scientist. They unambiguously came down on the side of passing moral judgment and claiming that there was a distinctive, pathological psychology common to all the Nuremberg defendants. Selzer published an article called “The Murderous Mind” in the New York Times Magazine, including Eichmann’s drawings from two other projective tests, the Bender-Gestalt Test and the House-Tree-Person Test, and blind diagnoses describing Eichmann as a “highly warped individual.” The Kelley-Gilbert debate was being rehashed again in the media, and now about Eichmann’s results as well.
Critics immediately called The Nuremberg Mind biased, written to prove the authors’ preexisting judgments. Most psychologists felt its authors had relied too heavily on content analysis, recognized by the 1970s as the most subjective and least verifiable approach to Rorschach interpretation. Others responded by embracing subjectivity and bias. In a 1980 analysis of Eichmann’s Rorschach, one psychologist unapologetically admitted that it had influenced his analysis to know whose test it was, but he argued that his goal was insight into a particular individual’s complex personality—“to discover more about what this particular man may have been like”—not an objective diagnosis.
Still, a consensus had been reached. The Nuremberg Rorschachs showed, as Kelley and Harrower claimed, that there was no such thing as a “Nazi personality.” In the one case where we wanted there to be an unbridgeable difference between people, a moral chasm between Nazis and “us,” the test seemed to have reached the opposite conclusion—and seemed to imply that these differences between people could not be judged.
The case of Eichmann’s Rorschach was more complex, partly because it concerned a single individual. Did the results show Eichmann to be normal or abnormal? The results as interpreted by whom? And was Eichmann actually a monster, or just an example of “the banality of evil,” and what does that term mean anyway? The debates around all these interlocking questions continue.
Taken together, though, these developments dealt a devastating blow to the status of psychological tests such as the Rorschach. There was no common ground to label evil as evil, no basis for moral judgment that everyone would accept, and grave doubts had been cast on the psychologist’s own moral authority.
The controversy around Arendt and Milgram was part of a seismic cultural shift that would come to full flower later in the sixties. Americans were increasingly suspicious not only of the authority of psychologists but of almost any institutional power, and the reputation of the Rorschach would be a casualty.
In the late 1950s, Dr. Immanuel Brokaw, perhaps the greatest psychiatrist who ever lived, disappeared without a trace from his prominent New York practice. He’d had a crisis of faith. One day, listening to tape recordings of his therapy sessions, he’d discovered that a patient had said her husband “loved the best in me,” not, as Brokaw had thought, “loved the beast in me.” A very different kind of marriage. Brokaw found he had been hearing wrong for years: hundreds of apparently successful treatments were all based on error and illusion. New contact lenses shook his worldview further, by revealing the dirt and ugliness in his formerly soft-focus surroundings, in his own face in the mirror. He might have been misperceiving reality all this time, but now he preferred not to see it.
Ten years later, a former close friend found Brokaw wandering up and down the aisle of a public bus in Newport, California. That was how he now spent his time, an old man in Bermuda shorts, an L.A. Dodgers baseball cap, black leather sandals, and a psychedelic shirt: brightly flowered, crammed with details, fluttering and swarming with line and color. All the great doctor had left to offer was a simple question about his shirt: “What do you see?” Men and women, adults and children, saw horses in it, clouds, big waves and super surfboards, lightning, Egyptian amulets, mushroom clouds, man-eating tiger lilies. Not a sunset but a beautiful sunrise! His shirt provoked laughter and delight, an answer of their own from everyone he asked, until a contented Dr. Brokaw would step out of the bus and disappear across the beach.
Brokaw is not often mentioned in histories of psychology because he is fictional. Ray Bradbury made him up in a story called “The Man in the Rorschach Shirt,” published in Playboy in 1966 and in book form in 1969. Silly though the plot was, it captured the countercultural spirit of the sixties, increasingly suspicious of authority figures and heartless experts of all kinds, whether Nazi bureaucrats, Milgram’s experimenters, nuclear Strangeloves, or just anyone over thirty. The story symbolized—and proposed the Rorschach as a symbol for—how rejecting singular truth could unleash a beautiful chaos of individuality.
In Bradbury’s story, the Rorschach shirt let Dr. Brokaw escape his psychiatric dead end. In the real world, clinical psychology was undergoing its own crisis of faith. At least some practitioners
were growing increasingly skeptical about their discipline’s leading test. What if the Rorschachs being given all across the country were based on error and illusion too?
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For all of the Rorschach’s prominence, the ambiguous inkblots had always fit somewhat uneasily into what American psychologists tend to think of as “the tough-minded attitude of the psychometric tradition.” Proponents of the test who understood it as “projective” continued to claim that the inkblots revealed the unique personality in ways that made standardization irrelevant. But the Rorschach played both sides, with scientists still wanting to use it as a test. And so its validity and reliability remained the subject of extensive research.
In the early 1950s, air force scientists had set out to study how the military might be able to use personality tests to predict success as a combat pilot. More than 1,500 air force cadets were given group Rorschach tests, along with a background interview, the Feeling-and-Doing questionnaire, a sentence-completion test specially designed for the air force, a group Draw-a-Person Test, and a group Szondi Test, where test takers were asked to say which were the most appealing and most repellent out of a set of facial photographs. Some of these cadets would go on to shine, rated well by their teachers and considered leaders by their peers; others would have good flying skills but be kicked out of the service because of “overt personality disturbances”; most were average or would fail for other reasons.
In 1954, the scientists randomly selected fifty case files from among the most successful cadets and fifty from the disturbed personalities and randomly divided the hundred cases into five groups of twenty. Each packet of twenty files was given to several assessment experts, among them Molly Harrower, the developer of the Multiple-Choice Rorschach, and Bruno Klopfer. Could they tell from the test results which category a cadet fell into? In other words, would a cadet’s initial tests, in the hands of the country’s foremost experts, have been able to predict his future psychological problems?
A coin toss would have been right an average of 10 times in each group of twenty cases. The psychologists were right an average of 10.2 times. Not a single psychologist did significantly better than chance. They were asked to say which evaluations they felt especially confident about, and even when counting only those cases, just two psychologists out of the nineteen did better than chance. Seven did worse.
Some of the psychologists said afterward that the air force modifications to the standard tests had skewed the results. Harrower had already pointed out, in response to similar negative findings, that maybe what makes a successful pilot “is not at present clearly envisaged in Rorschach terms”; maybe good soldiers don’t have what we normally think of as “good mental health” at all. Rorschach tests showed an equal number of “frankly unstable or psychopathic personalities” among both decorated aviators and those who had failed to complete more than five missions—but these were psychopathic personalities “judged by our peacetime standards.” A well-balanced personality in normal circumstances might not be the best suited for a dangerous and high-stakes environment like a fighter jet. Compelling counterarguments or not, “10.2 times out of 20” sounded pretty damning, if not of the Rorschach per se then certainly of the battery of personality tests on offer.
In other studies, the Rorschach proved worse at predicting job performance or academic success than more straightforward tools like report cards, employment records, or a short questionnaire. “Color shock”—Hermann Rorschach’s term for being startled by colored cards, a sign of vulnerability to being overwhelmed by emotions—was discredited when it was found to be just as common when subjects were shown black-and-white versions of the colored inkblots. Still more studies, investigating the claim that the Rorschach should be used with other tests and never by itself, found that incorporating Rorschach information into a battery of tests actually made the diagnosis less accurate, not more accurate.
Multiple studies found that clinical psychologists consistently overdiagnosed mental problems in Rorschach subjects. In one 1959 study, tests were given to three healthy men, three neurotics, three psychotics, and three with other psychological disorders. “Passive dependent personality”—“Anxiety neurosis with hysterical features”—“Schizoid character, depressive trends”: not one of the multiple Rorschach evaluators labeled any of the healthy subjects as “normal.”
The most cutting criticism spoke to the Rorschach’s great selling point: that the results depended on who you were, not on how you were trying to present yourself. The Rorschach was an X-ray, the test that couldn’t be faked any more than a slide could fool a slide projector. By 1960, though, studies were showing that examiners could consciously or unconsciously influence the results and that test takers modified their responses depending on why the test was being given, what the examiner thought of them, or just the examiner’s personal style. While some saw the interpersonal aspect of the test as part of its power, this did make the test less objective.
What psychological testers liked to call “clinical validity”—the fact that a skilled interpreter could use the Rorschach to gain insights that worked in practice and that could then be confirmed with the patient or checked against other sources—was starting to look very different to skeptics. They described these so-called insights as a combination of confirmation bias (overvaluing, even overperceiving, information one already agrees with), illusory correlations (deciding a connection exists that isn’t there), and the kinds of techniques used by fortune-tellers and psychics (unconsciously using contextual information, making statements true of almost everyone but felt to be insightful, offering “push” predictions subtly modified or even totally reversed in follow-up questions, and so on).
Blind diagnosis eliminated some of these issues but by no means all. The test still had to be administered by someone in contact with the test taker. Any verification of the diagnosis required checking it against the judgments of someone like the subject’s regular therapist, which only replicated the problem. Besides, for psychological truths, it was hard to say what outside confirmation could look like. If a clinician and a patient both felt that a description of the patient was true, what else was there? But these feelings would not satisfy a demand for hard proof.
Few claimed that Rorschach testers were consciously cynical frauds or quacks. Then again, a fortune-teller surrounded by customers amazed at the accuracy of his mind-reading might start to believe in his own astounding abilities, too—and some of the most forceful critics of the Rorschach drew just this analogy. At the very least, they expressed dismay at a “Rorschach culture” of orthodoxy, arguments from authority, and antiscientific bias.
Such criticisms, appearing in professional publications, had little effect on the Rorschach, which was in widespread use and central to the self-definition of clinical psychology. There was too great a demand for the access to the personality that the inkblots claimed to provide.
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The Cold War was running at its hottest in the sixties, demanding total ideological clarity in the battle between communism and capitalism, and there were moments when the fate of the world quite literally depended on how ambiguity was interpreted. In October 1962, President Kennedy was handed photographs of Cuba taken from America’s most advanced U-2 spy plane, which either did or didn’t show a Soviet medium-range ballistic missile launch site, and either were or weren’t reason to start a nuclear war.
JFK saw “a football field” in one picture; RFK saw “the clearing of a field for a farm or the basement of a house.” Even the deputy director of the National Photographic Interpretation Center—there was such a thing, established in 1961—admitted that the president would have to take “on faith” what the pictures showed. But what was needed was certainty. When JFK delivered a televised address to the nation on October 22, he called the photographs “unmistakable evidence” of a Soviet missile site; when they were reproduced around the world, the public found them just as unmistakable.
The combin
ation of real ambiguity and an overwhelming need for visual and ideological certainty produced what has been called a “Cold War crisis of images” affecting both sides of the Iron Curtain. Capitalists and communists alike went looking for secret messages behind everything, and insisted they had found them. A new word for hiding specific meanings in material that seemed random and intentionless—“encryption”—entered Webster’s Dictionary in 1950. US Customs officials were confiscating abstract paintings sent from Paris because they thought the images contained communist messages. Ambiguities like the inkblots’ now tended to be thought of no longer as fruitful methods for exploring individual personalities but as codes to be deciphered.
Efforts to read minds were inseparable from attempts to control them—a link clearest in the research and debates on so-called “brainwashing” that rocked American behavioral sciences around the time of the Korean War. (These were the techniques immortalized in popular culture by The Manchurian Candidate: novel 1959; movie 1962.) The US government heavily promoted efforts to plumb the recesses of “the Soviet mind,” “the African mind,” “the non-European mind,” and so on, both in anthropology and more generally. It funded ventures like the Fulbright Fellowship, promoting cultural exchange and infiltration, and the creation of Area Studies (“Latin American” or “Far East” departments in prominent universities).
Psychology was seen as intrinsically linked to national security and the cause of democracy, and even outside of specific hotspots like Latin America or the Soviet mind, the inkblots were widely deployed to penetrate foreign psyches. Bleuler’s Moroccan farmers, Du Bois’s Alorese, and Hallowell’s Ojibwe had been just the beginning. Scholar Rebecca Lemov has counted five thousand articles published between 1941 and 1968 in what she calls the “Projective Test Movement”: research using Rorschachs and other projective methods on peoples from the Blackfoot Indians in the American West to every last Ifalukan living on coral islands in Micronesia totaling half a square mile. These studies, too, were well funded by the government. “Cold War–era look-inside-your-head fantasies flourished,” Lemov remarks.
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