The Inkblots
Page 40
“If only I knew,” Bleuler concluded rather sadly, “how I’m supposed to write more unconsciously” (F/B, letters 5B, 8B). The mail-order analysis quickly trailed off.
“An absolutely stunning acknowledgment”: To Fliess, quoted in Schröter, introduction to F/B, 15. “I am confident”: F/B, letter 12F.
“two warring worlds”: The Freud/Jung Letters: The Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, ed. William McGuire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), hereafter cited as “F/J,” 3F.
It was Jung: “Freud’s Theory of Hysteria: A Reply to Aschaffenburg,” a seven-page blast of superficial praise and cool superiority (Jung, Collected Works, 4:3–9); Jung vents his real feelings in F/J, letter 83J. Following quotes: F/J, letter 2J, 219J, 222J, 272J.
“I am the city of Naples”: This patient, a dressmaker, was one of Jung’s favorite examples (Collected Works, 2:173–74; Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage, 1989).
Jung’s accusation: Bair, Jung, 98, paraphrasing Jung, Memories, 114; see 683n8.
running a large hospital: Bleuler’s key essay was published only in 1908—ten years after his return to the Burghölzli and more than twenty after starting at Rheinau—and his celebrated book on schizophrenia appeared in 1911. He had devoted his time and energy to his patients and to improving conditions at the Burghölzli (doubling its staff, tripling its admissions, increasing its budget tenfold): “Publicizing his discovery took back seat to the problem of running the asylum” (Kerr, Most Dangerous Method, 43).
“twenty years”: Bair, Jung, 97.
never met Rorschach: A 1957 interview, in C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 329.
“in Vienna”: To Morgenthaler, November 11, 1919. The 1916 lecture (see chap. 8 below) remarks that psychoanalysis is indicated for fewer types of illness now—“even Freud has gradually limited the indications somewhat”—and that there is usually no need to dig all the way down to childhood to cure a neurotic.
word association test: At one point, Rorschach set aside sixty francs, a third of all the money he had, for a watch with a 1/5-second indicator “to use in psychological experiments,” no doubt the word association test (to Anna, July 8, 1909). It came in handy within a month, when a man discharged from the army was brought in for evaluation after stealing a horse. Rorschach used the test to establish a precise diagnosis and find him not legally accountable for his actions (CE, 170–75).
“fascinated by archaic thought”: Olga R, 90.
“For this reason”: Jung, Collected Works, 3:162.
on the pineal gland: “On the Pathology and Operability of Tumors of the Pineal Gland” was Rorschach’s only essay that the editor intentionally excluded from Rorschach’s Collected Essays, as “almost entirely unrelated to his other work and too long to be included” (CE, 11).
none of these prejudices: Mösli, Eugen Bleuler, 174. Bleuler worked closely with his wife and always credited her (and his mother’s) psychological insight as indispensable.
“if an old person”: To Anna, July 7, 1908.
pledge of abstinence: To Anna, May 23, 1906.
Johannes Neuwirth: “The Association Experiment, Free Association, and Hypnosis in Removing an Amnesia” (CE, 196–205). Rorschach calls the soldier J.N.; expanded into pseudonym for readability.
Chapter 5: A Path of One’s Own
“Real work with real patients”: To Anna, May 23, 1906.
“The doctor meets with”: To Anna, September 2, 1908.
“two months busy being extraverted”: To Hans Burri, July 16, 1920.
“I know too many people”: To Anna, September 2, 1906.
“Berlin with its millions”: Ibid.
“I’m in total solitude”: To Anna, October 31, 1906.
“a little stone”: To Anna, November 10, 1906.
the modern metropolis: See Peter Fritzsche’s evocative Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), esp. 17, 109, 192.
“cacophonous blowing”: Quoted in ibid., 109, from Walter Kiaulehn, whom Fritzsche calls “Berlin’s great twentieth-century chronicler” (17). Much of Fritzsche’s book is suggestive for the Rorschach, e.g.: “The depiction of the city in an endless series of sharp, visually compelling images” meant that “men, women, and children, as well as newcomers, proletarians, and tourists, all imagined the city in different ways” (130–31).
“In a few years”: To Paul, December 5, 1906.
“cold” and “boring”: To Anna, October 31, 1906.
the society “despicable”: To Paul, December 5, 1906.
the whole experience “idiotic”: To Anna, January 21, 1907.
“worship the uniform”: To Anna, January 21, 1907; on the Captain of Köpenick, see Fritzsche, Reading Berlin, 160.
“the land of unlimited possibilities”: To Anna, January 21, 1907.
“You can see and understand more”: To Anna, November 16, 1908.
“retracing our father’s steps”: To Anna, January 21, 1907.
No one rereads War and Peace: To Anna, January 25, 1909.
“disappointed and a bit depressed”: Olga R, 89.
“Bern isn’t bad”: To Anna, May 5, 1907.
Anna jumped at the chance: Her stay in Russia was her own decision: Hermann had pushed for a governess position in England, preferring it over Russia as “a school for character, lifestyle, and insight into human nature,” but Anna turned it down; a few months later, she eagerly accepted the job in Russia. (To Anna, September 17, 1907, and January 31 and February 6, 1908.)
“When I read your first letter”: To Anna, December 9, 1908.
Russian paintings: Rorschach specifically mentions a “very beautiful gray picture” called Christ by Ivan Nikolayevich Kramskoi, which he had hung above his desk in Bern; and Russian folklorist and Romantic modernist Viktor Vasnetsov’s God the Father, which hung in his room. He also mentioned wanting a postcard of Above Eternal Peace by Isaac Levitan, master of the so-called mood landscape.
“Do it”: To Anna, November 16, 1908.
“I’m enclosing one of my photos”: To Anna, October 21, 1909. The next year he would write, “I’ve finally learned how to take photographs properly. I’ve enclosed some of our best ones, with descriptions. Tell me how you like them. How’s your photography coming?” (August 3, 1910).
“I could come to him”: ARL, 2.
“meat market” of Berlin streetwalkers: To Anna, October 31, 1906.
“Shockingly many men see women”: To Anna, September 17, 1907.
“The stork question”: To Anna, June 15, 1908.
“You will probably know more”: To Anna, November 16, 1908.
“see a country only when”: To Anna, December 9, 1908.
“You only learn to love”: To Anna, September 17, 1907.
“You have to write me”: To Anna, May 26, 1908.
“You know, Annali”: To Anna, May 26, 1908.
at age four: Fut, 180.
“My love”: HRA 2:1:48. This is the consistent tone of the surviving letters; most were destroyed by Olga or their children, for privacy (HRA catalog note).
“She doesn’t feel well”: To Anna, November 27, 1908.
“Four people died on me”: To Anna, September 2, 1908.
“I’ve had it up to here”: To Anna, December 9, 1908.
“finally, finally! be done”: To Anna, November 27, 1908.
his professional options were limited: Ellenberger, 180.
He hoped he could earn enough: To Anna, January 25, 1909.
“If science is not very far advanced here”: To Anna, early July, 1909.
“I like Russian life”: To Anna, April 14, 1909.
“This waiting!”: To Anna, April 2, 1909.
“Kazan is not a large city”: To Anna, April 2, 1909.
Hermann helped Olga study: To Anna, April 14, 1909.
“lacking in understanding”: To Anna, early July 1909.
; “and obviously we didn’t want to”: Ibid.
“No human society treats women”: To Anna, May 26, 1908.
“trying to prove that Woman”: To Anna, December 22, 1909.
“it is true and it remains true”: Ibid.
“a doctor or engineer”: Ibid.
one last maddening incident: To Anna, August 27, 1909.
Chapter 6: Little Inkblots Full of Shapes
These were a few: CE, 115 (another doctor’s patient), 112–13, 118.
collection of psychiatric cases: HRA 4:2:1.
Münsterlingen Clinic: StATG 9′10 1.1 (reports), 1.6 (brochure), 1.7 (album).
spoke German and Russian: To Anna, September 24, 1909.
“The director is very lazy”: Ibid.
“It’s totally natural”: To Anna, October 26, 1909.
“At last”: To Anna, September 24, 1909.
“a very nice little town”: Olga to Anna, August 3, 1910.
the same route: Mikhail Shishkin, Auf den Spuren von Byron und Tolstoi: Eine literarische Wanderung (Zurich: Rotpunkt, 2012). Olga R, 89: “He loved Münsterlingen and felt utterly happy there, almost like a king in his two-room ‘home of his own’ with a view of his beloved Lake Constance that he enjoyed in all kinds of weather.”
“Lola and I are doing well”: To Anna, November 14, 1910.
“There is a fair”: Olga and Hermann to Anna, August 3, 1910.
a large cargo ship: 1913 Annual Report, p. 11.
her “perfect” gift: To Anna, late December 1910. “Of all the Russian writers,” Hermann wrote, “the one I most like reading is Gogol, because of his beautiful language.”
“to give her something”: Ibid.
sent his sister Goethe’s Faust: To Anna, December 22, 1909.
art therapy: Blum/Witschi, 92–93; John M. MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Princeton University Press, 1989), 187 and n8. At a sanitarium near Berlin “sports, gardening, and art therapy were in full operation” in 1908, and the patients had pets, including a donkey (Ellenberger, Discovery of the Unconscious, 799).
got hold of a monkey: Ellenberger, 192.
from a troupe of traveling players: Urs Germann, personal communication, 2014. The name “Fipps” survives only in a handwritten caption to a photograph of the monkey: StATG 9′10 1.7.
eleven articles: Three were short notes on sexual imagery he had come across in his reading or practice, simply published for the record; others were psychoanalytical essays applying Freudian theory directly, such as “Failed Sublimation and a Case of Forgetting a Name,” “The Theme of Clocks and Time in a Neurotic’s Life,” and “A Neurotic’s Choice of Friends,” which explored the unconscious elements at work in the choice. One article was forensic along Jungian lines, using the word association test: “The Theft of a Horse in a Fugue State” (all in CE).
“For a period”: Roland Kuhn, “Über das Leben…,” StATG 9′10 8.4. He praises Rorschach’s essays and dissertation for being “well written and interesting, and particularly attentive to the human qualities in people, skillfully portraying their personalities and destinies and highlighting their abilities.”
a patient’s drawing: “Analytical Remarks on a Painting by a Schizophrenic” (CE, 178–81).
about a wall painter: “Analysis of a Schizophrenic Drawing” (CE, 188–94).
would take the patient’s hand: WSI Mrs. Gehring (first name not recorded).
“I’m glad”: To Paul, December 8, 1914.
“Mother gave me nothing”: To Anna, May 23, 1911.
“despite everything he went through”: To Anna, November 14, 1910.
Swiss and German newspapers: Rorschach’s work as a columnist—“his desire to communicate, to formulate ideas, and to take up important matters of the day”—was “truly unusual” (Müller, Abschied vom Irrenhaus, 107, 103).
“Russian Transformations”: März [March], issue 12 (1909); HRA 6:1. “The new Russian society is undergoing rapid transformations. Like the individual during puberty. First, the recent political activities; then, after the onset of reaction, persistent and aggressive political repression—repression in the psychological sense…”
Andreyev was considered: His plays were widely performed and made into movies, including He Who Gets Slapped (1924). “The Thought” is in Leonid Andreyev, Visions (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 31–78.
“This writing for the papers”: To Anna, early July 1909.
“his constantly moving”: Olga R, 94; translated in the Appendix.
“fanatical”: Rita Signer and Christian Müller, “Was liest ein Psychiater zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts?” Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychiatrie 156.6 (2005): 282–83. His excerpts of Jung’s Symbols and Transformations of the Libido ran to 128 pages; in his studies of sects, mythology, and religion, he took notes on books such as Paul Max Alexander Ehrenreich’s General Mythology and Its Ethnological Foundations and Myths and Legends of the Primitive Peoples of South America, Ludwig Keller’s The Reformation and the Older Reform Parties, Karl Rudolf Hagenbach’s seven-volume Lectures on Church History, and Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.
Justinus Kerner: Ellenberger, Discovery; Karl-Ludwig Hoffmann and Christmut Praeger, “Bilder aus Klecksen: Zu den Klecksographien von Justinus Kerner,” in Justinus Kerner: Nur wenn man von Geistern spricht, ed. Andrea Berger-Fix (Stuttgart: Thienemann, 1986), 125–52; Friedrich Weltzien, Fleck—Das Bild der Selbsttätigkeit: Justinus Kerner und die Klecksografie als experimentelle Bildpraxis zwischen Ästhetik und Naturwissenschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2011).
botulism, the bacterial food poisoning: Erbguth and Naumann, “Historical Aspects of Botulinum Toxin: Justinus Kerner (1786–1862) and the ‘Sausage Poison,’ ” Neurology 53 (1999): 1850–53.
“curiously gifted”: Afterword to a 1918 edition of Kerner’s early novel The Travel-Shadows of Lux the Shadow-Player, quoted in Kerner, Die Reiseschatten (Stuttgart: Steinkopf, 1964), 25.
Klecksographien: Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/4394/1. The opening stanza of the first poem is typical: “Everyone carries his death inside him— / When all outside is laughing and bright / You roam today in the light of the morn / And tomorrow in the shadow of night.”
“daguerreotypes”: Kerner to Ottilie Wildermuth, June 1854 (quoted in Weltzien, Fleck, 274): “In some ways, the images remind me of the new photographic pictures, even though one does not need a special apparatus for them and they rely on a very old material: ink….The strangest images and figures are formed entirely from themselves, without any contribution from me, like the pictures in a photographic camera. You can neither influence nor guide them. You can never bring forth what you want; you often get the exact opposite of what you expected. It is remarkable that these pictures often resemble those from the bygone eras of the dawn of mankind….For me they are like daguerreotypes of the invisible world, even though, since they are tied to the blackness of the ink, they can only make visible the lower spirits. But I would be very surprised if the higher spirits too, the spirits of light from the middle realm and heaven, were unable to arrange the chemical processes of photography in their own way so as to shine forth in it. What are those spirits, in the end, if not wanderers in light?”
many historians: Ellenberger, 196; E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon, 1960); H. W. Janson, “The ‘Image Made by Chance’ in Renaissance Thought,” in De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky (New York: New York University Press, 1961), 1:254–66; “Chronological and geographico-cultural proximity makes a direct link more than likely” (Dario Gamboni, Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art [London: Reaktion, 2002], 58). Olga R, 90, says that her husband knew these images by Kerner from early on, but she described them in the context of imagination, not perception (see chap. 10 below for why this is misleading): “He had always b
een interested in ‘imagination,’ and viewed it as the ‘divine spark’ in humanity….It was like a half-conscious premonition inside him that maybe these ‘accidental forms’ could serve as a bridge to test the imagination.”
Rorschach was asked: From and to Hans Burri, May 21 and May 28, 1920. These were personal letters, written before the publication of the test; Rorschach had no reason to lie about Kerner’s influence.
The Rorschach test is sometimes also linked with graphology, but Rorschach knew nothing about graphology as late as 1920 and was not very interested when told about it (WSI Martha Schwarz-Gantner).
child’s game: Jung, Memories, 18. Henry David Thoreau, The Journal, 1837–1861 (New York: New York Review of Books, 2009), February 14, 1840, with a page of inkblots slipped in, unpublished but preserved in the Morgan Library, New York. WSI Irena Minkovska.
used before: Alfred Binet and Victor Henri, “La psychologie individuelle,” L’Année Psychologique 2 (1895–96): 411–65, quoted in Franziska Baumgarten-Tramer, “Zur Geschichte des Rorschachtests,” Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychiatrie 50 (1942): 1–13, 1; cf. Galison, 259–60.
It reached Russia as well: F. E. Rybakov, Atlas dlya ekspiremental’no-psikhologicheskogo issledovaniya lichnosti (Moscow: Sytin, 1910), excerpted in Baumgarten-Tramer, “Zur Geschichte,” 6–7.
an American, Guy Montrose Whipple: See his Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (Baltimore: Warwick and York, 1910), chap. 11, “Tests of Imagination and Invention,” Test 45: Ink-Blots.