His attitude toward Freud was not an “orthodox” one: that is, he did not accept everything, and saw psychoanalysis simply as a medical treatment method indicated in certain situations and not others. He was decidedly opposed to the dominant tendency of the time, that of applying psychoanalysis to every question in life and even to writers, which he felt risked castrating the human spirit, dumbing down, and removing bipolarity, the necessary presence of any dynamism. He himself never underwent analysis, and always declined with a laugh any such suggestion from his psychoanalytical friends.
In women, what he valued par excellence was femininity, “nobleness of heart,” goodness, a sense of domesticity, courage in everyday life, and cheerfulness. He disliked suffragettes and women with solely intellectual interests. He had not spent much time studying philosophy and saw this as a gap; he liked to say that he would start studying philosophy only after he turned forty. He did study gnosticism, though.
He was more drawn to the Bernese than to the other Swiss; he considered them very dynamically charged and liked their down-to-earthness and “rootedness.” His favorite Swiss city was Zurich, both for having more to offer than any other Swiss city and for being the city of his youth. During vacations, he enjoyed Ticino to the fullest.
H.R. worked with amazing ease, as though playing, and was extremely productive. The secret of his productivity was his constantly moving between different activities. He never worked for hours at a time at one thing; he liked to move from intellectual work to manual labor and back. He never worked in the evenings, which he devoted to his family; likewise never while on vacation, which was meant solely for relaxation, for dolce far niente. This changing of task, this transition from intellectual creation to woodworking or reading, restored him, refreshed his mind and receptiveness. He also liked visitors, but not unannounced and not if they stayed too long. Hour-long conversations on a single topic tired him, even if it was one he found interesting.
He saw his book Psychodiagnostics as a key to knowing people and their capacities, and as key to understanding culture, the work of the human spirit. He took the large view and saw the possibility, in the future extension of the method, for fathoming the connection (a kind of synthesis), the human as such. He rarely spoke in these terms. For him, Psychodiagnostics was not an already finished crystal, it was only the beginning—he saw it in statu nascendi, in flow, as a probing and seeking. He hoped to find people to work with him, followers, but did not venture to say so openly, given his modesty. For him, his book was already “obsolete.” With his perpetual inner creativity, he had already gotten much farther than the version preserved in writing there.
He knew that his method rested on no theoretical basis, hence his insistence, in the first publication of his book, on the “preliminary necessity” for “unassailable definitions” of his terminology and concepts. He had serious reservations about popularizing his method too widely, seeing the risk of it being dragged down to the level of a “fortune-telling machine.” He was already deeply uneasy with the tendency of G. Roemer (who, incidentally, despite his claims, never “collaborated” with H.R.) to lead his method onto other tracks. He saw that process not as one of further development, but as variation and fragmentation that would only provoke misunderstandings. Even three days before his death, he spoke about this topic and suffered from the thought of it.
After H.R.’s death, Eugen Bleuler wrote to me: “Your husband was a genius.” It is not my place, as his wife, to claim such a thing, but I was always well aware that I was sharing a life path with a highly gifted, unique, uncommonly harmonious, and utterly lovable person, possessing great intellectual gifts and a rich artistic soul. He was steadily expanding his Experience Type from introversion toward ever-increasing extraversion. He thereby attained an enviable balance, and can properly be labeled as ambiequal. Obviously he was not conscious of this himself.
I would like to close with his own words (from a letter to G. Roemer) to convey how he understood this balance: “The person who is ‘truly alive,’ the ideal human being, is ambiequal: he can transition from intense introversion to extensive extraversion. This human ideal is the genius. That would seem to mean: Genius = Normal Human Being! But there is probably some truth in that.” In that sense, Hermann Rorschach was a normal human being.
Rorschach’s silhouette self-portrait
When I started writing this book, the biographical trail seemed to have gone cold. Rorschach’s children, aged two and four when Hermann died, had passed away in 2006 and 2010. The family had protected their privacy, and a lot of personal material had been destroyed. The selection of Rorschach’s letters published in 2004 omitted information thought to be “merely personal”; in the letters and diaries in the archive, pages were missing or blacked out.
The Hermann Rorschach Archives and Museum in Bern, Switzerland, was an exceedingly modest place, on the ground floor of an apartment building, with a handful of glass cases showing his cap labeled “Klex,” draft inkblots, and a few drawings. They had managed to convince the heirs to donate all the material that remained, but there wasn’t much apart from mementos and trinkets.
Before long, that cold trail started to seem almost cursed. In 2012, a fire destroyed the top floor of the building housing the Rorschach Archive, and the automatic sprinklers caused water damage throughout the building. The Archive was luckily spared but was relocated to the university library in Bern, and public access was closed off indefinitely. The author of the first history of the inkblots to use extensive archival material, Naamah Akavia, died of cancer in 2010; Christian Müller, coeditor of Rorschach’s letters and author of numerous short articles on Rorschach, planning a future biography, died in 2013. In a far-flung corner of the internet I found a ten-page biographical sketch of Rorschach from 1996, claiming that “the first full length biography from unpublished primary source material” was “in preparation” by the author, Wolfgang Schwarz. The biography had never been published, and Schwarz had died in 2011.
I requested from the archive a folder labeled “Correspondence with Wolfgang Schwarz.” The earliest letter establishing contact was from 1959, and a letter from Lisa dated September 4, 1960, set up a meeting between Schwarz and the family: Lisa, Wadim, and Olga. Schwarz, a German American born in 1926 who had discovered Psychodiagnostics at his university library in 1946 and stayed up all night reading it, had become interested in Rorschach’s life. With the first grant from the National Institutes of Health in medical history, he tracked down and interviewed everyone he could find and organized and translated the material, all while working as a psychologist for sixty-two years and raising, eventually, eight children. He corresponded with Hermann’s sister Anna, who lived until 1974. The most tantalizing document in the archive was a nineteen-page outline and table of contents for his tome Hermann Rorschach, M.D.: His Life and Work, with a handwritten note from Lisa dated 2006: “Finally finished in 2000/01, seeking a publisher.”
One hot June evening in 2013, I sat down at Susan Decker Schwarz’s living-room table in Tarrytown, a suburb of New York, with a large metal lockbox in front of me. It contained, she told me, her late husband’s lifework. She hadn’t gone through it and didn’t know German. He had spent decades hunting down every fact about Rorschach’s life but had shown the results to no one.
The box contained hundreds of Rorschach family photographs, letters, and drawings, both copies and originals; test protocols written in Hermann’s handwriting; a first printing of the inkblots. Much of the material duplicated what I had already seen in the Bern archives, but much was new, including some of the most striking family photographs and the long letter from Olga to Hermann’s brother describing Hermann’s last days. Next to the metal box, stuffed into a shopping bag, was a thousand-page printout of Schwarz’s manuscript. Schwarz used to say to his son about the archive in Switzerland that “they’ve got half and I’ve got half.” By the end of that June evening, there were two Hermann Rorschach Archives: one in Bern and the ot
her in my apartment.
Two large plastic bins Susan Schwarz found later contained the core of Wolfgang’s research: 362 pages of notes from his interviews. He had found and spoken to Rorschach’s colleagues, his best friend from school, his and Olga’s live-in maid; the widow of Konrad Gehring, with whom Rorschach had made his first diagnostic inkblots; the woman who was in the room when Olga was told that Hermann had died. The manuscript, though, was almost entirely translations from Rorschach’s letters and files. Schwarz had wanted to let Rorschach speak for himself, and the more he found, the less he could bear to leave anything out. It was not shaped into a biography, but it was an amazing cache of indispensable research.
I am deeply grateful to Wolfgang Schwarz’s widow and children for giving me access to all this material, and their blessing to use it. It has now been donated to the Rorschach Archive, to be made available to others.
I would also like to thank the many other people and institutions that made it possible for me to write this book. The Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center and the Doris and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library gave me fellowships, and fellowship—I owe a great deal to Gary Giddins and Michael Gately at the Levy; Jean Strouse, Marie d’Origny, Paul Delavardac, Caitlin Kean, and Julia Pagnamenta at the Cullman; and my inspiring cohorts of other fellows. In Switzerland, Rita Signer and Urs Germann of the Hermann Rorschach Archive in Bern; Beat Oswald, Erich Trösch, and their colleagues at the Staatsarchiv of the Canton of Thurgau in Frauenfeld, Switzerland; Hans Ruprecht and Marianne Adank, gracious hosts in Bern in 2010; the 2013 Walser Weltweit conference that brought me and other Robert Walser translators from around the world to see Herisau; Raimundas Malašauskas and Barbara Mosca, who invited me to speak on Hermann Rorschach at the “HR” Summer Academy of the Paul Klee Center in Bern; and Reto Sorg, for kindness and generosity on many fronts. Editors Amanda Cook, Domenica Alioto, and Meghan Houser at Crown and Edward Orloff, my agent at McCormick Literary, put in a titanic amount of work on a first-timer’s book of narrative nonfiction and made it what it is, for which I am very grateful; thanks too to Jon Darga and the rest of the Crown team, especially designer Elena Giavaldi, for making such a beautiful product. Jay Leibold, Scott Hamrah, and Mark Krotov read the work in progress—they and many other friends provided valuable help and encouragement.
This book is dedicated to Danielle and Lars, for a lifetime of teaching me how to see.
All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
Abbreviations
Archives
HRA: Hermann Rorschach Archive (Archiv und Sammlung Hermann Rorschach), Bern, Switzerland; the HR collection unless otherwise noted
StATG: Staatsarchiv Thurgau, Frauenfeld, Switzerland
WSA: Wolfgang Schwarz Archive, now donated to the HRA to be cataloged and accessible there
WSI: Wolfgang Schwarz’s interview with [name], cited from notes in the WSA, emended for clarity and translation accuracy
WSM: Wolfgang Schwarz’s unfinished manuscript, much of it consisting of quotations from Rorschach’s letters translated into English
Key Writings by Rorschach
PD: Psychodiagnostics: A Diagnostic Test Based on Perception (Bern: Hans Huber, 1942; 6th ed., 1964), trans. Paul Lemkau and Bernard Kronenberg from Psychodiagnostik: Methodik und Ergebnisse eines wahrnehmungsdiagnostischen Experiments (Deutenlassen von Zufallsformen) (Ernst Bircher, 1921; expanded 4th ed., Hans Huber, 1941). The translation is poor and I have retranslated all quotations, but my notes give the page numbers in the English edition.
Fut: The only other text by Rorschach published in English to date is “The Psychology of Futurism,” trans. Veronika Zehetner, Peter Swales, and Joshua Burson, in Akavia, pp. 174–86. Here, too, I have referred to the German and corrected the translations (HRA 3:6:2).
IN GERMAN:
CE: [Collected Essays] Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. K. W. Bash (Hans Huber, 1965).
Diary: September 3, 1919, to February 22, 1920 (HRA 1:6:6).
Draft: “Investigations of Perception and Apprehension in the Healthy and the Ill,” with the title “1918 Draft” added later with a different typewriter, August 1918 (HRA 3:3:6:1).
L: [Letters] Briefwechsel, ed. Christian Müller and Rita Signer (Hans Huber, 2004). This selected edition, made while Rorschach’s children were alive, omits letters and parts of letters judged to be “merely personal.”
Smaller groups of letters are published in “Hermann Rorschachs Briefe an seinen Bruder,” ed. Rita Signer and Christian Müller (Luzifer-Amor: Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse 16 [2005], 149–57); Georg Roemer, “Hermann Rorschach und die Forschungsergebnisse seiner beiden letzten Lebensjahre” (Psyche 1 [1948], 523–42); CE, 74–79; Anna R, 73–74. Some letters are translated in the WSM (translations emended by me), with the originals either in the WSA or missing.
All letters to and from Rorschach are cited by date, regardless of where and whether they have been published. The HRA is the source of these other publications and the single source for researchers now that it includes the WSA.
Key Writings About Rorschach
There is little useful nontechnical writing on Hermann Rorschach and the inkblot test. The major sources are:
Akavia: Naamah Akavia, Subjectivity in Motion: Life, Art, and Movement in the Work of Hermann Rorschach (New York: Routledge, dated 2013, actually 2012).
Ellenberger: Henri Ellenberger, “Hermann Rorschach, M.D., 1884–1922: A Biographical Study,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 18.5 (September 1954): 171–222, more easily available in Beyond the Unconscious: Essays of Henri F. Ellenberger in the History of Psychiatry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 192–236, but the version there is abridged, with not all deletions indicated. My notes give page numbers from the Bulletin version. The German translation in CE (19–69), meanwhile, is “slightly altered and expanded by K. W. Bash based on remarks by Anna Berchtold-Rorschach, with the permission of the author.” Material not in English is cited from CE.
ExCS: John E. Exner Jr., The Rorschach: A Comprehensive System, vol. 1 unless noted, year cited to indicate which edition.
ExRS: John E. Exner Jr., The Rorschach Systems (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1969).
Galison: Peter Galison, “Image of Self,” in Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science, ed. Lorraine Daston (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 257–94.
Wood: James M. Wood, M. Teresa Nezworski, Scott O. Lilienfeld, and Howard N. Garb, What’s Wrong with the Rorschach? Science Confronts the Controversial Inkblot Test (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003).
IN OTHER LANGUAGES:
Anna R: Anna Berchtold-Rorschach, “Einiges aus der Jugendzeit,” in CE, 69–74.
ARL: Anna Berchtold-Rorschach, “Lebenslauf,” September 7, 1954 (HRA Rorsch ER 3:1).
Blum/Witschi: Iris Blum and Peter Witschi, eds., Olga und Hermann Rorschach: Ein ungewöhnliches Psychiater-Ehepaar (Herisau: Appenzeller Verlag, 2008), esp. essays by Blum (58–71, 72–83), Witschi (84–93), and Brigitta Bernet and Rainer Egloff (108–20).
Gamboni: Dario Gamboni, “Un pli entre science et art: Hermann Rorschach et son test,” in Autorität des Wissens: Kunst- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte im Dialog, ed. Anne von der Heiden and Nina Zschocke (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2012), 47–82.
Morgenthaler: Walter Morgenthaler, “Erinnerungen an Hermann Rorschach: Die Waldau-Zeit” (1954), in CE, 95–101.
Olga R: Olga Rorschach-Shtempelin, “Über das Leben und die Wesensart von Hermann Rorschach,” in CE, 87–95; the second half is translated in the Appendix above.
Schwerz: Franz Schwerz, “Erinnerungen an Hermann Rorschach” (Thurgauer Volkszeitung, in four installments, November 7–10, 1955).
Journals
JPA Journal of Personality Assessment, a continuation of
JPT Journal of Projective Techniques, itself continued from
RRE Bruno Klopfer’s Rorschach Research Exchange
A
uthor’s Note
“simply having previous exposure”: Gregory J. Meyer et al., Rorschach Performance Assessment System: Administration, Coding, Interpretation, and Technical Manual (Toledo, OH: Rorschach Performance Assessment System, 2011), 11. See chapter 22 below.
Introduction: Tea Leaves
Victor Norris: Caroline Hill, interview, January 2014.
Any questions: These are scripts taken from the standard Rorschach manual of the time, instructing examiners how to deflect questions: ExCS (1986), 69, quoted in Galison, 263–64.
were “perverse”: Elizabeth Weil, “What Really Happened to Baby Johan?,” Matter, February 2, 2015, medium.com/matter/what-really-happened-to-baby-johan-88816c9c7ff5.
One movie reviewer: David DeWitt, “Talk About Sex. Have It. Repeat,” New York Times, May 31, 2012.
“spatial rhythm”: PD, 15.
CeeLo Green remembered: “Gnarls Barkley: Crazy,” Blind website, www.blind.com/work/project/gnarls-barkley-crazy.
“The method and the personality”: Walter Morgenthaler, “Preface to the Second Edition,” in PD, 11.
“a tall, lean, blond man”: Ellenberger, 191.
Chapter 1: All Becomes Movement and Life
One late December morning: This imagined scene is based on letters, photographs, and Rorschach’s habits. Typical German-Swiss children’s games: Reto Sorg, Robert Walser Center in Bern, personal communication, 2012.
their ancestors: Heini Roschach, 1437; Jörni Wiedenkeller, 1506; there are full details starting with Hans Roschach, b. 1556, and Balthasar Wiedenkeller, b. 1562 (HRA 1:3; Ellenberger, CE, 44).
The Inkblots Page 38