In this technocratic context, the collected information was likely to end up as enormous stockpiles of data in archives and university libraries. The Vicos Collection at Cornell documented how the university leased a Peruvian village in 1952, expropriated it to the sharecroppers, and managed its transition into modernity, studying it and its inhabitants with projective tests every step of the way. The Microcard Publications of Primary Records in Culture and Personality in Wisconsin, known as the “database of dreams,” contained thousands of miniaturized Rorschach protocols and life histories, slices of life such as the Rorschach responses of one hard-drinking Menominee Indian from northeastern Wisconsin who had run aground on the transition to modernity. Card VI, he said, “is like a dead planet. It seems to tell the story of a people once great, who have lost…like something happened. All that’s left is the symbol.”
Another Menominee, a peyote worshipper, found the inkblots more comforting: “You know, this Rorschach…is something like peyote in a way. It looks into your mind. Sees the things that aren’t out in the open. It is like that with peyote. At a meeting you get to know a man in a few hours better than you would get to know him in a lifetime otherwise. Everything about him is right there for you to see.”
Perhaps the low point of Cold War ambitions for psychology came when ARPA, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, sent teams of psychologists into the war-torn jungles of Vietnam. They tested more than a thousand peasants with a modified TAT (uncaptioned pictures, redrawn from the Harvard originals by a Saigon artist), looking for the values, hopes, and frustrations that motivated them. They then met with military and civilian officials eager to “convert a war of devastation into a ‘welfare war’ ” that would bring “peace, democracy, and stability” to the region, and wanting to tailor their counterinsurgency propaganda to win over the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese. As one historian puts it: “The Vietnamese psyche was a crucial policy target.”
Simulmatics Corporation was a for-profit research company originally founded in 1959 to computer-simulate voter behavior before the 1960 presidential election. It had since branched out, and in 1966 it sent Walter H. Slote, a Columbia University lecturer and psychotherapist, to Saigon for seven weeks. His mission: uncover “the Vietnamese personality.” He believed that one life could reveal the forces that shape others—the “deeper” a single person’s motivation, “the more likely it is to represent universals”—and so he drew his conclusions from four people. After duly conceding that the sample was too small to generalize from, he generalized away.
A senior Buddhist monk and faculty member of three Vietnamese universities; a bombastic student demonstration leader who had brought down an interim government and lived for the glory of dramatic rebellion; a leading intellectual, the son of a poor village farmer who had made it to France at age sixteen, graduated at twenty, and returned as a dissident writer; and a Vietcong terrorist who had bombed the US Embassy and six other sites, “a thoroughly deadened man” who said “the only moments of happiness he had ever known were those when he was killing.” What “character structure” had made these four “evolve into the kinds of persons they had become”? Slote used Rorschach and TAT tests and psychoanalyzed his four subjects for two hours a day, sometimes up to seven hours a day, five to seven days a week, to find out.
After repeatedly digging for personal details, despite his subjects’ discomfort in talking about such matters, Slote concluded that family dynamics “held the key” to the Vietnamese psyche. In Vietnamese culture, authoritarian parents were idealized and all hostility toward them was repressed. This left the Vietnamese feeling unfulfilled, incomplete. They were really just “looking for a kind, loving father figure”—they had “the desire, at times almost wistful, to be embraced by authority,” and they cast the United States in the role of “the all powerful, all giving father image.” That meant, “in essence,” that the Vietnamese were not anti-American at all, they were pro-American! Unfortunately, such thoroughgoing repression also built up “monumental amounts of rage” that had to be channeled somewhere. This explained “their very volatile and confused perspective in regard to the role of America.”
Slote noted a strategy he found especially paranoid: his subjects’ tendency to “start in the middle of an incident and totally disregard the precipitating antecedent events” in assigning blame. For instance, the Vietcong fighter had the obviously delusional idea that American soldiers wanted to kill innocent Vietnamese civilians. Americans had shot at a bus full of farmers. Slote pointed out that the bus was passing a building where a bomb had just gone off; the Americans had reason to think this busload of civilians might be enemies; “under the immediate circumstances the Americans might understandably not have used their best judgment,” he suggested. Yet for some reason, these facts were “completely disregarded” by the Vietcong member as he interpreted the Americans’ gunfire. “A profound lack of critical self evaluation,” in Slote’s view.
With hindsight, it is easy to see the profound lack of critical self-evaluation in Slote himself. He ignored any political, historical, or military reasons the Vietnamese might have had to hate America. To the extent that the United States was responsible at all for “fostering this unhappy situation,” it was only because we were just too big and powerful. But this was apparently what Americans wanted to hear: a 1966 front-page article in the Washington Post called Slote’s work “almost hypnotically fascinating”; officials in Saigon found it “extraordinarily perceptive and persuasive.”
—
By the end of the sixties, the rising tide of antiauthoritarianism was bringing exercises such as Slote’s to an end. There were students in the streets, revolution in the air. Academics were increasingly uneasy about being associated with murky government funding, and the idea that any technique could give curious and tolerant American investigators nearly perfect access to otherwise inaccessible souls was starting to seem a lot less plausible.
Anthropologists had promised that projective tests could give voice to the people being tested, but it was increasingly hard to ignore that, in Lemov’s words, such tests purported to “provide a kind of instamatic psychic X-ray that, by its very workings, allocated to the expert the task of discerning the true meaning of what was being said, what the native was thinking.” It was the same ethical dilemma raised by any notion of the unconscious: If you claim that there are things about people that they are unaware of, you are claiming to speak for them better than they can speak for themselves, usurping their right to their own life stories. Third World locals, politicians, and revolutionaries were making it increasingly clear that they wanted their own voices heard.
In anthropology, there was a growing emphasis on biology and a move back toward behavior-based theories, which saw social interactions as more significant than unconscious mental states. Culture and Personality studies, and especially the projective test movement, quickly collapsed into total irrelevance, neither practiced nor taught nor read. Even its old champion, Irving Hallowell, now looked back on his Ojibwe studies and doubted that the Rorschach had made any valuable contribution—it had only supplemented what he’d already learned in other ways.
Analogous shifts were under way in the mental health professions. Newly discovered psychopharmaceuticals—antidepressants, lithium, Valium, LSD—were prompting a swift turn away from psychoanalytic psychiatry toward the “hard science” psychiatry we know today. With the rise of community-based mental health treatment focusing on external socioeconomic and cultural forces, and the return to prominence here too of behavior-based theories, it started to seem relatively pointless to pay attention to the mind or to inner motivations.
Within clinical psychology in particular, criticisms of the Rorschach were gathering force. Surveying the situation in 1965 for the most highly respected reference work in the field, The Mental Measurements Yearbook, distinguished psychologist Arthur Jensen was as blunt about the Rorschach as anyone before or
since: “Put frankly, the consensus of qualified judgment is that the Rorschach is a very poor test and has no practical worth for any of the purposes for which it is recommended by its devotees.”
It was Jensen in this essay who called the Rorschach test “as closely identified with the clinical psychologist as the stethoscope is with the physician,” but he didn’t mean it as a compliment. The test was not merely useless: it could “lead to harmful consequences in nonpsychiatric settings, such as in schools and in industry,” because of its tendency to overpathologize. “Why the Rorschach still has so many devotees and continues to be so widely used is an amazing phenomenon,” he concluded, whose explanation requires “greater knowledge of the psychology of credulity than we now possess. Meanwhile, the rate of scientific progress in clinical psychology might well be measured by the speed and thoroughness with which it gets over the Rorschach.”
In the widespread, decentralized use of the Rorschach at midcentury, even such a forceful indictment from a prominent voice in the field was lost. No single authority, however well credentialed, was trusted to give the last word. The year after Jensen’s article saw the publication of both Walter Slote’s report and Ray Bradbury’s story—paternalistic Cold War testing taken to an extreme and the reaction against it. In the unlikely event that Slote or Bradbury ever heard of Jensen, they wouldn’t have cared in the least about his critique.
And yet clinical psychology did, in Jensen’s words, “get over” Freud with a “speed and thoroughness” that was downright startling. Beginning in the late sixties, Freudian psychotherapy tumbled from undisputed centrality to being an embattled, sometimes cliquish enclave. The Rorschach—its validity under question, the trustworthiness of the people administering it under suspicion—could easily have met the same fate.
In some countries it did. But in America it survived, both in the culture at large and within clinical psychology.
The inkblots had already emerged as a metaphor for the same antiauthoritarian relativism that was calling the test into question. Your reaction to a blot, or shirt, now delightfully interpreted itself, no doctor in a white coat or puffing a cigar behind a couch required. The free self-expression that the culture was demanding was just what the inkblots offered, at least in the popular imagination.
Precisely when Dr. Brokaw was taking his shirt to the people, the Rorschach was becoming a symbol in real life for anything that elicited different, equally valid opinions. In 1964, a reviewer confronted with ten books about New York summed up: “Composing a New York City book is a kind of projective psychological test, a Rorschach, say; the five boroughs are only a stimulus to which the observer responds according to his personality.” In the New York Times at least, this was the first of thousands of Rorschach clichés to come. Charles de Gaulle would soon be “a Rorschach test” for biographers; the loose plot ends of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey were a Rorschach test too.
In a culture-wide crisis of authority, it was easier for arbiters to stop claiming authority at all. Opinions differed, and calling something “a Rorschach test” meant there was no need to take a side and risk alienating anyone. Journalists and critics no longer saw it as their job to tell readers which possible reaction to New York City or 2001 was correct: everyone had the right to their own opinion, and an inkblot was the indispensable metaphor for that freedom.
A resonant metaphor alone, though, would not have been enough to save the Rorschach as an actual psychological test. The fact had to be addressed that, by this point, there was no such thing as “the” Rorschach test at all.
The man who would change that was John E. Exner Jr., born in Syracuse, New York, in 1928. After a stint in the air force during the Korean War, serving as an airplane mechanic and physician’s assistant, he came back to the States and went to college at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He first saw the inkblots in 1953 and knew at once he had discovered his life’s work. He enrolled at Cornell and began his PhD in clinical psychology.
What he found was chaos. Klopfer’s and Beck’s approaches had continued to diverge since the forties. Hertz had her own methods, while two other systems were gaining prominence in the United States, the psychoanalytic Schafer-Rapaport and Zygmunt Piotrowski’s idiosyncratic “Perceptanalysis,” not to mention various other approaches abroad. All of these used the same ten inkblots in the same order, although some added an additional sample blot, shown at the start to explain to test takers what they were going to be asked to do. But the administration procedures, scoring codes, and follow-up questioning were often incompatible, and even what the test was fundamentally testing for varied widely.
None of these methods was used by a clear majority of psychologists, although Klopfer maintained his plurality, with Beck in second. Professors didn’t know which system to teach; practitioners themselves combined them ad hoc. As Exner would later describe it, they operated “by intuitively adding a ‘little Klopfer,’ a ‘dash of Beck,’ a few ‘grains’ of Hertz, and a ‘smidgen’ of Piotrowski, to their own experience, and calling it The Rorschach.”
Even the pettiest details proved bedeviling. When administering a Rorschach test, where should you sit? Exner had read in Rorschach and Beck that you should sit behind the test taker; Klopfer and Hertz said sit to the side, Rapaport-Schafer said face-to-face, and Piotrowski said wherever was “most natural.” This range of views was not because the seating arrangement didn’t matter but because of contradictory, well-worked-out reasons in favor of each approach. But you had to sit somewhere.
A generation after Marguerite Hertz had tried and failed to heal the “rift in the family” of Rorschachers, Exner took up the challenge. It was Exner who, as a twenty-six-year-old graduate student in 1954, had turned up at Sam Beck’s house in Chicago accidentally carrying Klopfer’s book, and was asked: “You got that from our library?” When he later told his committee about the faux pas, one of them suggested: “Why don’t we call old Klopfer and you can go out and work with him next summer?” Exner did, and, he later recalled, “fell in love with both those guys.”
Klopfer and Beck remained implacable, but at Beck’s suggestion and with Klopfer’s approval Exner decided to write a short paper comparing the two systems. Each thought his system would “win.” That short paper grew into a long book that took Exner nearly a decade to write: a detailed history and description of the five main Rorschach systems, with biographies of the various founders and a full-length sample interpretation using each method. In 1969, at age forty-one, he published The Rorschach Systems.
Exner found that the five systems generally overlapped on key concepts Hermann Rorschach had discussed explicitly, such as the significance of Movement responses or of the sequence of Whole and Detail responses. But in the many areas of the test where Rorschach was vague or had offered no guidance before his early death—administration procedures, theoretical underpinning, codes beyond the few he proposed—later Rorschachers had gone their own ways.
It was clear what needed to come next. Drawing on thousands of published studies and surveys of hundreds of practitioners, Exner started compiling a synthesis. Five years later, in 1974, he published The Rorschach: A Comprehensive System—five hundred pages long, with numerous further volumes, revisions, and spinoffs to follow. Its stated goal: “to present, in a single format, the Best of the Rorschach.”
Methodically moving through every aspect of the test, Exner brought it all into a single framework. He eventually decided on side-by-side seating, incidentally, to reduce the influence of any nonverbal cues from the examiner, and noted that seating for all kinds of psychological tests should probably be reconsidered given the research on how behavior can be influenced. He provided numerous sample results and interpretations, and far more complete lists of common and uncommon responses—the crucial “norms” that were used to determine whether a test taker was normal or abnormal. Ninety-two Whole responses for Card I:
Good: Moth
Good: Mythological creat
ures (on each side)
Poor: Nest
Good: Ornament (Xmas)
Poor: Owl
Good: Pelvis (skeletal)
Poor: Pot
Poor: Printing press
Poor: Rocket
Poor: Rug
Good: Sea animal…
There followed 126 more things found in nine typically interpreted details areas of the card, and 58 more responses covering ten rarely interpreted areas, all shown on diagrams. Then on to Card II…
The Comprehensive System was more complex than any Rorschach method yet, packed with new scores and formulas. Hermann Rorschach’s dozen or so codes had now mushroomed to some 140 in total, including
Present Distress (eb) = Unmet Internal Needs (FM) + Situation-Determined Distress (m) / Shading Responses (Y + T + V + C′)
or
3 × Reflection (r) + Pair (2) / Total Responses (R) = the “Egocentricity Index”
In plain English: If John Doe gave two answers for each card on a Rorschach test, his total number of responses (R) would be 20. Any answer describing the inkblot as something and its mirror image or reflection—“A woman looking at herself in a mirror”; “A bear stepping across rocks and water, and here’s his reflection in the creek”—had to be coded in Exner’s system as a Reflection response, “r,” along with its other codes. (The stepping bear would be a Movement response, and a Color response too if the “water” was a blue part of the card, and Whole or Detail, et cetera.)
The Inkblots Page 29