In all the changes to scoring systems, administration procedures, and understandings of the meaning of the test, Rorschach’s inkblots have remained constant, for good reason.
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An essay on the Rorschach by the philosopher Jean Starobinski poetically opens: “ ‘Every movement reveals us,’ Montaigne wrote. Today we might add: every perception is likewise a movement and reveals us too.” And today, Rorschach’s insights about perceiving movement continue to be recognized as the most original and lasting aspect of his work. They have also been directly confirmed by some of the most talked-about neuroscience research in the past thirty years.
In the early 1990s, scientists at the University of Parma, Italy, made a seemingly simple discovery: some of the same brain cells in macaque monkeys fired both when the monkeys performed an action, like reaching for a cup of water, and when they saw someone else—another monkey, or a picture of a monkey, or a person—perform the same action. A series of ingenious experiments followed, showing that the cells didn’t fire when the monkeys observed the same movement without the intention (the hand held the same way but not reaching for a cup), and did fire when performing a different action for the same purpose (using the left hand instead of the right hand, or using reverse-pliers, where fingers have to be spread apart instead of pinching together). It seemed that these neurons were reacting to the meaning of the actions. Rather than simply controlling mechanical or motor processes, they were reflexes that brought the intentions and desires of others right into the brain.
The problem of learning how to understand other people or decode their behavior—the philosophical problem of other minds—disappears if it’s true that we neurologically mirror, literally feel, what others are trying to do. The scientists dubbed the cells “mirror neurons” and unleashed a torrent of research and speculation linking them to everything from the nature of autism to political opinions to kindness and the foundations of human society.
In 2010, another team of Italian scientists made the connection to the Rorschach. They hypothesized that if mirror neurons fire when a person sees intention in an action, perhaps they fire when a person sees movement in a picture: “We speculated that such mentalization is very close to what is thought to occur when an individual articulates the M response while observing the Rorschach stimuli.” When they put EEG wires on the heads of volunteers looking at inkblots, they found “highly significant” mirror neuron activation when subjects were giving Human Movement responses, and not responses for animal movement, inanimate movement, Color, Shading, or Form. “For the first time to our knowledge,” they concluded, Movement responses were proven to have a neurobiological basis. “This overall result is fully consistent with the century-long tradition of the Rorschach theoretical, as well as empirical, literature.” Further studies of the Rorschach and mirror neurons followed, work that R-PAS cocreator Donald Viglione facilitated and that Finn and Meyer often cite.
The true significance of mirror neurons remains controversial—as does the whole idea that scanning technology such as MRI can straightforwardly read the brain, much less read minds. But whatever else they are or aren’t, mirror neurons have reawakened scientific interest in what Rorschach’s dissertation on reflex hallucinations described, and what the Movement responses in the Rorschach test show: that we feel, in our mind and body, what happens in the world, and that these literal or imagined movements are how we perceive in the first place.
Other recent experiments have shown that smiling when someone else smiles, or nodding in sync—behavior known as motor synchrony—not only produces emotional rapport, it is emotional rapport. We all know that if you see someone with a pained facial expression you feel their pain, but mimicry is a cause, not effect, of perception: in one study, participants holding a pencil between their teeth, thus unable to smile, frown, and so on, were much less adept at noticing emotional changes in other people’s facial expressions. The mimicry, the physical movement, was needed to make perception possible. “It turns out that the perception of a face almost invariably implies motion. It is very difficult to look at a face and not to think about it in motion, making facial expressions.”
Rorschach had already talked about visualizing a painting only after he held his arm the way the knight in the picture was holding his. Edgar Allan Poe gave the same strategy to his star detective, Dupin, in “The Purloined Letter”: “When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.” It seems counterintuitive, but only from a framework that imagines the mind working like a computer, with the eye as a camera and the body as a printer or speaker: input—processing—output, perception—recognition—mimicry. That’s not how it works.
The Movement response—in a sense, the entire inkblot experiment—rests on the premise that seeing includes the process of “feeling-in” to what you see, and that feeling is something that happens through seeing. This idea has come a long way since its origin in German aesthetic theory circa 1871, especially under its English name: empathy.
Empathy has been even more discussed in recent years than mirror neurons, with book after popular nonfiction book putting it at the center of what it means to be human. Some contrarians, such as Paul Bloom, even argue against it: if empathy is biased toward the familiar and the attractive, overrides quantitative facts (we feel more for a single baby in a well than for a thousand faceless casualties far away), indeed is downright “parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate,” then we may make better decisions about complex problems without it.
Discussions of the Rorschach test can bring useful perspectives to today’s debates, since the whole history of the test, from its birth in the debate over whether psychiatry should define diseases or understand individuals, has been one of balancing the competing claims of “feeling into” other perspectives and keeping a distanced stance of rational objectivity. Stephen Finn’s work, in particular, can be used to reframe the conversation around empathy. In reflecting on the C/TA approach, he argued that empathy does three different things. It is a way of gathering information: you come to understand someone by feeling their pain or standing in their shoes, not just by monitoring their behavior. It is an interactive process: while a therapist is trying to understand, a person eager to be understood is “at the same time tracking me and giving me information to help me understand her inner world better.” Finally, empathy is a healing element in its own right: compassion can heal; many of Finn’s clients tell him that feeling so deeply understood itself changed their lives. These three modes of empathy can point in different directions: a con man may be extremely sensitive and able to read people, “empathetic” in one sense, while sociopathically unempathetic in what he does with that information. From this perspective, arguments like Bloom’s point to the weaknesses of empathy as an information-gathering tool but also overlook its value as a means of connection and healing.
Perhaps the most valuable reminder that the Rorschach can give is that empathy is a matter of more than words and stories. Empathy is vision: feeling into the world and then seeing out there something you connect to, in your body. Empathy is a reflex hallucination, a Movement response. It requires not just imagination, or a certain sensibility, but sensitive and accurate perception. You don’t feel someone’s feelings without seeing that person as they really are, which means seeing the world through their eyes.
I came to the inkblots from the cultural side, not as a practicing psychologist or crusader against personality testing. I had no ax to grind about whether the test, in whichever system, should be in second place or ninth; like most of the people I talk to, I was surprised to learn it was still used in clinics and courtrooms at all. “Rorschach” was a strange word to me, too—person, place, or thing?
—and I knew nothing about Hermann Rorschach’s life. What I did know was that I had seen everything under the sun called a Rorschach test. I had seen the inkblots, or thought I had, and I wanted to find out more.
My first step was to take the real test. That was when I learned that not just anyone knows how to give it, and the experts tend not to be inclined to indulge idle curiosity. I went looking for someone at least a little disillusioned, who knew all the techniques and formulas but who also still saw the test as an exploration, something you could talk about. I was eventually referred to Dr. Randall Ferriss.
In his office, he pulled his chair in front of mine, a little to the side, took out a legal pad and a thick folder, and handed me a cardboard card from the folder. “What do you see?”
In Card V, I saw, of course, a bat. In Card VIII, “the witch of winter.” In what used to be called the Suicide Card, “a big friendly dog with floppy ears.”
“Oh!” I gasped when handed Card II, startled by the red even though I had already read that not all the blots were going to be black and white. “Affect shock,” Ferriss noted down.
I said Card III was “people holding buckets,” and that the gray streaks “make it look like they’re moving.” Later, when I knew enough to discuss the technical details with him, Ferriss told me that this might have been a Shading response: something gray that is moving or held in some kind of tension. Lots of Shading responses were thought to imply anxiety, Ferriss said. But there was also Cooperative Movement in my answer, and it was a Popular response. “So it’s all good.”
The whole thing took about an hour, and I came back at the end of the week to hear the basic interpretations and results. Did the test work? The exercise was not meant to diagnose me, settle a lawsuit, or kick-start therapy, so in that sense no. There was nothing for it to do. It seemed revealing, as these things go, and Dr. Ferriss’s take on my personality seemed more or less insightful. What struck me most were the ten cards themselves, so rich and strange—enticing enough, in any case, for me to spend the next several years exploring their history and their power. Ferriss told me I was a little obsessive.
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Even now, I don’t quite know what to make of the color in the cards. “The multicolored blots are bad” and the colors “have a repellent effect on any painter”: so said Irena Minkovska, a painter and neurologist’s wife who knew Hermann and Olga Rorschach personally. Irena’s sister-in-law Franziska Minkovska, another friend from Kazan in 1909, agreed. She had moved to Paris in 1915 and later wrote a major psychological study of Vincent van Gogh, and when she gave the Rorschach test to various modern artists in Paris—I wish I knew who—she said they all reacted badly to the colors.
Color may be the inkblot test’s weak point, and it is telling that the new test Rorschach was starting to develop at the very end of his life, with his artist-psychologist friend Emil Lüthy, was specifically devoted to color. Still, once “color shock” was discredited as a diagnosis for “neurosis,” Rorschach’s bigger idea—that color is connected to emotion—was the baby thrown out with the bathwater. There has been almost no research on color in the Rorschach for half a century. The fact remains that people often do have startled responses to the colored cards, however that behavior is interpreted. I clearly did. Rorschach designed the colored cards to throw subjects off balance if they are disposed to be thrown, so maybe their troubling effect means they’re working as planned.
In any case, it is the strong designs of the endlessly fascinating black and white blots, with or without red, that are obviously Rorschach’s lasting masterpieces—not exactly art, but not not art either.
Some art historians are finally starting to take them seriously. Classic surveys had occasionally mentioned Rorschach inkblots but typically fell into the trap of simply listing precursors, especially Leonardo da Vinci’s splotches on the wall and Kerner’s klexography, whose influence on Rorschach was consistently overstated. A long essay published in 2012 was the first thorough treatment of the inkblots, drawing nuanced connections to Ernst Haeckel, Art Nouveau, and modernism. The catalog for a groundbreaking 2012 show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Inventing Abstraction, included an essay discussing Rorschach’s inkblots together with Malevich’s abstract paintings, Einstein’s thought experiments, and Robert Koch’s Nobel Prize–winning visualizations of tuberculosis bacilli. There are countless visual connections still to be made.
Descended from artists on both sides of his family, Hermann Rorschach had a lifelong belief in perception as the point of intersection between mind, body, and world. He wanted to understand how different people see, and at the most fundamental level, seeing is, as the painter Cézanne said of color, “the place where our brain and the universe meet.”
Alone among the pioneers of psychology, Rorschach was a visual person and created a visual psychology. This is the great path not taken in mainstream psychology, even though most of us today, even the talkiest or most bookish, live in a predominantly visual world of images on surfaces and screens. We evolved to be visual. Our brains are in large part devoted to visual processing—estimates run as high as 85 percent—and scientists are beginning to take that fact seriously; advertisers in quest of “eyeballs on the page” started to take it seriously a long time ago. Seeing runs deeper than talking.
Freud, though, was a word person. The whole tradition he founded, from noticing puns and “Freudian slips” to talk therapy itself, was designed to reveal the unconscious in what we say or don’t say. It is psychology by the word people, for the word people. Modern psychology, meanwhile, worships at the altar of statistics—the revenge of the math people. Almost every field of knowledge is skewed to the verbal or the mathematical. Education is conducted in lectures and written tests and fetishizes statistical measures even more than psychology does. In intellectual life, these often seem like the only two choices: numbers or words, data or stories, science or humanities, hard or soft.
But that’s not all there is. There are visual people, music people, athletes and dancers with brilliant physical intelligence, the enormous emotional intelligence of consolers and manipulators. Imagine if history essays were expected to include charcoal drawings of the main people or landscapes, not just sketches in words, and if historians were trained to draw as much as to write—every artist knows that that’s a true and serious source of knowledge.
Love him or hate him, it changes things to frame Freud as a word person, because we all know that not everyone is one. I am a word person married to a visual person, a painter and art historian. Every day I come up against the fact that these two types of people see the world in often incompatible ways—or rather, visual people see it and word people read it. I’ve talked to a lot of word people who have visual types in the family, and vice versa: this fundamental difference is news to none of them. Hermann Rorschach was among the first to use that whole side of the human experience to explore the mind.
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The fact that people come in different “types” raises the specter of relativism, which loomed into view with Jung’s Psychological Types and came to the fore with the breakdown of authority in the sixties. Rorschach’s fundamental insight was a visual version of Jung’s types: we all see the world in different ways. But the fact that it’s visual makes all the difference. Understanding the real inkblots and their specific visual qualities gives us a way to move beyond the relativism, at least in principle. It’s not all arbitrary: there’s something truly there that we’re all seeing in our own way. Rorschach’s insight can stand without forcing us to deny the existence of valid judgments, Truth with a capital T.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard, after describing this book to someone: “It’s like the Rorschach test is a Rorschach test! It can mean anything!” I want to say No, it isn’t. However tempting it may be to “present both sides” and leave it at that, the inkblot test is something real, with a particular history, actual uses, and objective visual qualities. The blots look
a certain way; the test either works in a given way or it doesn’t. The facts do matter more than our opinions about them.
The Rorschach metaphor is changing, too. It first came to prominence in America with a culture of personality that privileged unique individual qualities and demanded a way to measure them. It became a symbol of the same antiauthoritarian impulses that brought down an earlier generation’s psychiatric experts. For decades it was a symbol for irreconcilable individual differences. Now it often reflects a growing impatience with fragmentation, and the promise of sharing our worlds with one another.
I have started seeing it used to describe not something we react to, revealing our personality, but instead how we express ourselves. The writer of an August 2014 Lucky magazine story about owning eight nearly identical pairs of black skinny jeans said, “I call them my Rorschach pants. Whatever I want them to be, they’ll be.” That same year, the data-cruncher of the dating site OK Cupid published an analysis of self-descriptions in online profiles, revealing what words are most and least typical for different combinations of gender and ethnicity. “My blue eyes,” “snowmobiling,” and “Phish” are used most by white men compared to other groups; “tanning” and “Simon and Garfunkel” are used least by black women compared to others. The least used words, he wrote, are “the negative space in our verbal Rorschach”—a revealing picture of our self-presentation.
These are arguably just garbled metaphors, failing to realize that a Rorschach test consists of images we are shown, not ones we make. I don’t see it that way. These particular mistakes, if that’s what they are, would not have been made ten or fifty years ago.
Even when inkblots are used as a test, it’s not so much our reaction that matters nowadays as what we do with it. On November 8, 2013, Rorschach’s birthday, Google’s doodle of the day was an interactive Rorschach test. As a glum but somehow likable Hermann took notes, you could click to see different blots, then share your answers on Google+ / Facebook / Twitter. “What do you see?” had turned into the onscreen instruction: “Share what you see.”
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