Binet’s own inspiration—Leonardo da Vinci: Baumgarten-Tramer, “Zur Geschichte,” 8–9, quotes Leonardo’s “Treatise,” speculating that Binet got the idea from this passage. The Leonardo scene was fictionalized by Dmitri Merejkovski in his well-known novel The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci (1902; repr., New York: Random House, 1931), 168, which Hermann and Olga read together (Ellenberger, 198, quoting the scene). George V. N. Dearborn, “Notes on the Discernment of Likeness and Unlikeness,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods 7.3 (1910): 57.
early blots: HRA 3:3:3; WSI Mrs. Gehring.
Chapter 7: Hermann Rorschach Feels His Brain Being Sliced Apart
“In my first clinical semester”: Rorschach’s dissertation (CE, 105–149), 108–109. Quotes and examples in this chapter are from his dissertation unless noted.
Robert Vischer: “On the Optical Sense of Form” (1873), in Empathy, Form, and Space, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), quotes from 90, 92, 98, 104, 117, emended in places. See editors’ introduction to Ibid.; Irving Massey, The Neural Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), esp. “Nineteenth-Century Psychology, ‘Empathy,’ and the Origins of Cubism,” 29–39. Carol R. Wenzel-Rideout, in a diligent dissertation, discovered no direct link between Rorschach and Vischer’s theory of empathy but convincing circumstantial evidence of his familiarity with the literature, and “at the very least a strong kinship” between their ideas (“Rorschach and the History of Art: On the Parallels between the Form-Perception Test and the Writings of Worringer and Wölfflin,” PsyD diss. [Rutgers University, 2005], 199–207; 70–74 are on Worringer).
“gift for entering”: Richard Holmes, “John Keats Lives!,” New York Review of Books, November 7, 2013.
a medical student: Massey, Neural Imagination, xii and 186–89, reading Keats’s poem “Ode to Psyche” as a fable of neuroscience that advocates for Psyche’s place in the Pantheon and evokes such neurological details as dendrite brain cells (“the wreath’d trellis of a working brain”) and neuroplasticity (“branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain”).
Since Freud wanted: He told André Breton in 1937 that “the superficial aspect of dreams, what I call the manifest dream, holds no interest for me. I have been concerned with the ‘latent content’ which can be derived from the manifest dream by psychoanalytical interpretation” (letter, December 8, 1937, quoted in Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton [Boston: Black Widow Press, 2009], 406, cf. 347–48).
Karl Albert Scherner: 1825–89. Freud especially appreciated Scherner’s attention to wish fulfillment, experiences from the day before the dream, and erotic longing as the substance transformed by the dream (Vischer, “On the Optical Sense,” 92; Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 83, 346, passim). One recent scholar calls Scherner “an interesting but mysterious figure, heavily buried under the sands of intellectual history,” even though “Scherner has by far the most justified claim to being Freud’s major forerunner, taking what was primarily an aesthetic theory and making it the basis of his dream psychology” (Massey, Neural Imagination, 37, and Irving Massey, “Freud before Freud: K. A. Scherner (1825–1889),” Centennial Review 34.4 [1990]: 567–76).
Abstraction and Empathy: Wilhelm Worringer, trans. Michael Bullock (1953; repr., Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1997). Rudolf Arnheim called Abstraction and Empathy “one of the most influential documents in art theory of the new century,” whose effect “upon the modern movement was prompt and profound” (New Essays on the Psychology of Art [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986], 50, 51).
no more valid or more aesthetic: Worringer takes as representative Theodor Lipps (1851–1914), the father of the “scientific” psychological theory of empathy, who stripped away Vischer’s mystical, pantheistic overtones and defined empathy simply as “objectified self-enjoyment.” For Lipps, reality distortion was “negative empathy,” a.k.a. “ugly.” Worringer rightly counters that distortions of reality give other cultures, other individuals, the same “happiness and satisfaction which the beauty of organic-vital form affords us” (Abstraction and Empathy, 17).
“valuable parallel”: “A Contribution to the Study of Psychological Types” (1913), Jung, Collected Works, 6:504–5. In Psychological Types Jung devotes an entire chapter to Worringer.
proposed five ideas: October 17, 1910; Ellenberger, 181; Akavia, 25ff.
Reflexhalluzination: The German psychiatrist Karl Ludwig Kahlbaum, who coined the term paranoia (F/J, 29n10), also created this term in the 1860s; it has always been translated literally.
John Mourly Vold: 1850–1907; Über den Traum: Experimental-psychologische Untersuchungen, 2 vols. (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1910–12). “One can hardly imagine two dream theories so totally opposed to each other”: Ellenberger, 200–201; Akavia, 27–29.
stepping on the foot: HRA 3:4:1, dated March 18–19, 1911. The patient was named Brauchli.
forced to drastically shorten: To Bleuler, May 26, 1912, July 6, 1912, July 16, 1912; L, 120n3. Rorschach’s essay “Reflex Hallucinations and Symbolism” (1912) contains material deleted from the dissertation linking it with psychoanalysis (CE; Ellenberger, 182; Akavia, 29).
Chapter 8: The Darkest and Most Elaborate Delusions
In 1895: “Zwei schweizerische Sektenstifter (Binggeli–Unternährer): Eine psychoanalytische Studie” [Two Swiss sect-founders (Binggeli–Unternährer): A psychoanalytic study], published in Freud’s journal of psychoanalysis and culture, Imago 13 (1927): 395–441, and as a fifty-page book (Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1927); two earlier essays are “On Swiss Sects and Sect-Founders” and “Further Considerations on the Formation of Swiss Sects” (all in CE).
Hermann Wille: WSI Manfred Bleuler.
Rorschach followed Brauchli: As it happens, one of the canonical crime novels in German, In Matto’s Realm (1936), takes place in “Randlingen,” a barely disguised Münsingen, and is about the murder of the asylum’s director, one “Ulrich Borstli.” Friedrich Glauser (1896–1938) was a patient there in 1919—where he instantly loathed Brauchli (uniformly remembered by others as warm and kind)—and again later. His novel vividly conveys the atmosphere, rooms and corridors, patients and treatments, and look and feel of life at a Swiss asylum, and “captures Brauchli so precisely,” according to the real asylum’s second in command, Max Müller, “not only in his outward appearance but in all his weaknesses, that it would be the death of him if he ever got his hands on a copy.” Müller started censoring Brauchli’s mail to make sure he never heard about the book. (Matto regiert [Zurich: Unionsverlag, 2004], 265n; the German edition has wonderfully evocative notes and photographs of Münsingen. In Matto’s Realm, trans. Mike Mitchell [London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2005].)
was fascinated: Morgenthaler, 98; see Ellenberger, 186; Blum/Witschi, 112.
his lifework: Ellenberger, 185; Rorschach said this to Karl Häberlin, a philosophy professor at the University of Bern.
No less dramatically deranged than Binggeli was a paranoid schizophrenic patient, Theodor Niehans, hospitalized in 1874 and in Münsingen from 1895 to 1919. His symptoms included stabbing his attendant and setting fire to the asylum woodworking shop on orders from God; Akavia gives a full description. Rorschach drafted a long case study (HRA 4:1:1), in the mode of several key Zurich School texts published between 1910 and 1914 in Yearbook for Psychoanalytic and Psychopathological Research, Bleuler and Freud’s short-lived journal edited by Jung. He also compiled a twelve-page table comparing Niehans to Schreber, Freud’s paradigmatic schizophrenic, “following in the footsteps of Jung and Bleuler” but also taking them farther and “anticipat[ing] present-day critiques of Freud’s reading of Schreber” (HRA 3:1:4; Akavia, 111ff.; Müller, Abschied vom Irrenhaus, 75–88).
“a thick book”: To Pfister, October 16, 1920.
Russian state medical exam: L, 128n4; Olga R, 90.
Silve
r Age: Etkind, Eros of the Impossible; Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Magnus Ljunggren, “The Psychoanalytic Breakthrough in Russia on the Eve of the First World War,” in Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1989), 173–92; John E. Bowlt, Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1900–1920: Art, Life and Culture of the Russian Silver Age (New York: Vendome Press, 2008), 13–26, quoting Alexandre Benois, designer for the Ballets Russes under Diaghilev and founding member of the World of Art movement.
“to heal”: Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius, 100, emended.
Osipov, for instance: Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius, 112; Ljunggren, “Psychoanalytic Breakthrough,” 175.
sanatorium gave preferential treatment: Sirotkina, 104; Etkind, Eros of the Impossible, 131.
a number of themes: Bowlt, Moscow and St. Petersburg, 29, 68, 90, 184.
advertising brochure: Nikolai Vyrubov, quoted in Ljunggren, “Psychoanalytic Breakthrough,” 173. That same year, Vyrubov launched the reception of Freud in Russia with an article on his experiences using Freudian psychotherapy at Kryukovo.
“rational therapy”: Sirotkina, 102.
Tolstoy, the wise, humanistic soul-healer: This is the theme of Etkind’s Eros of the Impossible. “There could hardly have been a better way to facilitate the reception of psychoanalysis in Russia than to link it with Tolstoy’s teachings” (Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius, 107). Another common foundation was the incalculable influence of Friedrich Nietzsche in Russia, on Freud, and on Jung (Etkind, Eros, 2). Overviews not centered on Freud’s reception in Russia describe German-style biomedical psychiatry as dominant: the line from Emil Kraepelin (who worked in Russia between 1886 and 1891) to Pavlov and beyond. In this view, the psychoanalytic Kryukovo psychiatrists were “noteworthy” exceptions (Caesar P. Korolenko and Dennis V. Kensin, “Reflections on the Past and Present State of Russian Psychiatry,” Anthropology and Medicine 9.1 [2002]: 52–53).
Freud had joked: F/J, 306F.
“censorship,” an explicit allusion: quoted in Etkind, Eros, 110.
a tale of Russian culture: Etkind, Eros; Ellenberger, Discovery (e.g., 543, 891–93); Sonu Shamdasani, intro to Flournoy, From India. It was not “mere chance” that Freud’s “favorite patient, like his favorite author [Dostoyevsky], was Russian”—Freud, with a Galician mother, was half-“Russian” himself (Etkind, Eros, 110–12, 151–52; James L. Rice, Freud’s Russia: National Identity in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis [New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993]).
In a lecture: The talk is published in Christian Müller, Aufsätze zur Psychiatriegeschichte (Hürtgenwald: Guido Pressler, 2009), 139–46; it is largely devoted to a few rather racy cases of psychoanalytic intervention in Rorschach’s own experience.
journalistic opening: Fut, 175. Probably in 1915: Akavia, 135.
modernist pressure-cooker: Russian Futurism, by Vladimir Markov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), is still the best source.
“walk with painted faces”: 133. Rorschach almost certainly saw the great poet Vladimir Mayakovsky—the astonishing orange-eater—in person: Mayakovsky was famous for his bright yellow or multicolored shirts, occasionally with accessories such as an orange jacket, a whip in his hand, or a wooden spoon in his lapel, and Rorschach’s Niehans case study compares Niehans’s “childishness” to “a phenomenon that I had the opportunity to observe in Russia last winter: a group of Russian Futurists: They paint their faces, walk around in fantastically colored blouses, and behave as far as possible in an uncouth manner” (quoted in Akavia, 133).
Mikhail Matyushin: Bowlt, Moscow and St. Petersburg, 310; Markov, Russian Futurism, 22; fullest account in Isabel Wünsche, The Organic School of the Russian Avant-Garde: Nature’s Creative Principles (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), 83–139.
Nikolai Kulbin: Markov, Russian Futurism, 5 and passim; Wünsche, Organic School, 41–49; an evocative description of Kulbin appears in Victor Shklovsky’s Third Factory (1926; trans. Richard Sheldon [Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002], 29). Rorschach mentions in his essay: “In a proclamation we read that P is red and Ш is yellow [Cyrillic for R and Sh—perhaps coincidentally, Rorschach’s and Shtempelin’s initials]; Kulbin spoke in his lecture of a blue C [Cyrillic for S]” (Fut, 179). This claim also appears in Kulbin’s manifesto “What Is the Word” (Markov, Russian Futurism, 180).
Aleksei Kruchenykh: Markov, Russian Futurism, 128–29. Rorschach quotes Kruchenykh’s “Poem from Single Vowels”—“o e a / i e e i / a e e i”—and a nonsense phrase by him as an example of Futurist language (Anna Lawton and Herbert Eagle, Words in Revolution: Russian Futurist Manifestoes, 1912–1928 [Washington, DC: New Academia, 2005], 65–67; Akavia, 143; Markov, Russian Futurism, 131).
“bring about movement and the new perception”: Markov, Russian Futurism, 128, paraphrasing Kruchenykh.
the poet is in a movie theater: Markov, Russian Futurism, 105; the poem is by the leader of the Mezzanine of Poetry, Vadim Shershenevich.
“the time has now passed”: Fut, 175–76.
In the most original analysis: Fut, 183–84. His ingenious explanation of the “error” is that the Futurist, painting one leg after another and feeling, in consequence, a sequence of attitudes in his body as he paints, is left with “an impression of succession” that he attributes to the painting itself—“It appears to him to be a real movement. But only to him.”
“A picture—The rails”: Fut, 183. This might be something he heard in person—it does not appear in any known Futurist writing (John Bowlt, personal communication, 2014).
ahead of his time: Although apparently a certain Russian, Dr. E. P. Radin, wrote Futurism and Madness in 1914, comparing pictures by children, madmen, and avant-garde painters: “Dr. Radin’s excursions into literary analysis are inept, and his ability to critically interpret paintings and drawings is limited, to say the least. At the end he is overcome by scientific objectivity and states that there is not enough data to declare the futurists mentally ill, but he warns that theirs is a dangerous road” (Markov, Russian Futurism, 225–26). Other than a short book from 1921, How Soviet Power Protects Children’s Health, I have not found any further trace of Radin.
Freud would freely admit: “The revolutions in painting, poetry, and music exploding all around him left Freud untouched; when they obtruded themselves on his notice, which was rarely, he energetically disapproved” (Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time [New York: Norton, 1988], 165).
Jung would write: Jung was “unread in current fiction, contemptuous of contemporary music, and indifferent to modern art,” and both of these essays met with a “lambasting by press and public….The public ridicule was humiliating” (Bair, Jung, 402–3).
German surrealist Max Ernst: MacGregor, Discovery of the Art, 278.
“bevies of girls”: Hans Arp, quoted in Movement and Balance: Sophie Taeuber-Arp, 1889–1943 (Davos: Kirchner Museum, 2009), 137.
Alfred Kubin: PD, 111–12; see Akavia, 127–32. Kubin (1877–1959) was associated with the Blue Rider group and also wrote a moving fantasy novel, The Other Side (1909). Rorschach took extensive notes on Kubin’s book (HRA 3:1:7; Diary, November 2, 1919; Akavia, 131), especially around synesthesia, and in PD he traces changes in Kubin’s introversion and extraversion across his career, connecting them to his different artistic productions.
“chronic question”: To Paul, May 1914.
“European longing”: Olga R, 90–91; “He remained, and wanted to remain, a 100 percent European.”
“It’s very hard to work”: April 2, 1909. Another time, he had half-jokingly defended his Swiss restraint against expectations of Russian effusiveness, signing off a letter to Anna: “You recently wrote to ask me why I don’t send you kisses. Kisses are cheap in Russia, and there are lots more kinds of kisses. Here there are fewer, and very few indeed with me, did you forget that? You�
��ll have to make do with regards, but they are Warm regards from Your brother, Hermann” (January 25, 1909).
Anna later recalled: CE, 32n.
“after our endless gypsy wanderings”: in Morgenthaler.
end of Olga’s six weeks: Olga to Paul, May 15, 1914.
by choice: Regineli (WSI) said of Olga’s staying that “maybe it was a test of will.”
hard work: He had about a hundred male patients and did his twice-daily rounds quickly to keep time for his other interests. “Everything was extraordinarily quick and easy for him….He quickly connected with the patients, saw what needed to be done, and gave his instructions….He wrote the case records fast too—for typical cases, a few sentences touching on the essential features.” He spent more time on patients who interested him, and “the director as well as certain grumbly staff members would sometimes complain that he didn’t care enough about the patients’ laundry, shoelaces, nightstands, and so on,” which deeply annoyed Rorschach, although after a few minutes and a joke or two, he would be back in form (Morgenthaler).
pioneering study of art and mental illness: Walter Morgenthaler, Madness and Art: The Life and Works of Adolf Wölfli (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992); see MacGregor, Discovery of the Art.
The other pioneering work on the subject was Hans Prinzhorn’s Bildnerei der Geisteskranken [Image-making by the mentally ill] (1922; repr., New York: SpringerWienNewYork, 2011), and Rorschach was directly connected with him as well. In 1919, Prinzhorn praised Rorschach’s 1913 article on a schizophrenic’s drawing as “highly instructive,” and Rorschach sent him artwork he had collected from patients. In 1921, he wrote to ask if Rorschach’s book would be published in time for him to cite it along with Jung’s and Morgenthaler’s, as he wanted to; the publishers’ delays made this impossible (from Karl Wilmanns, December 13, 1919; to Bircher, February 12, 1921).
schizophrenic named Adolf Wölfli: Wölfli (1864–1930) “could serve as Exhibit A in a study of the outsider phenomenon….His achievement is a revelation” (Peter Schjeldahl, “The Far Side,” New Yorker, May 5, 2003).
The Inkblots Page 41