The Inkblots

by Damion Searls

  In long, insightful descriptions: For instance, Jung, Psychological Types, 160–63, on how an introvert might complain about how extraverts can’t sit still, but only an introvert would be bothered—the extravert is simply living his life.

  When Jung was asked: C. G. Jung Speaking, 342.

  Jung wrote in the epilogue: Pages 487–495; quotes below are from these pages unless noted.

  “sprang originally from my need”: Quoted in Jung, Psychological Types, v; cf. 60–62 and C. G. Jung Speaking, 340–43, 435.

  it had taken Jung years: In 1915, Jung recruited an extraverted psychiatrist colleague, Hans Schmid-Guisan, as a sparring partner who would not let him get away with his own prejudices. At the time, Jung still thought that extraverted thinking was intrinsically inadequate, that feeling was irrational, and in general that any traits the opposite of his own were “mere aberrations.” The dialogue ends in mutual frustration, as each side proves unable to understand the other—Jung in particular comes off as an autocratic jerk, but then he is supposed to be, since he is playing the role of the imperious, introverted visionary against the other man’s extraverted, socially adept collegiality. It worked, though: five years later, Jung had come to recognize the existence and validity of other types. “The introvert cannot possibly know or imagine how he appears to his opposite type unless he allows the extravert to tell him to his face, at the risk of having to challenge him to a duel,” Jung writes in Psychological Types—but that is just what Jung did, and came out the other side (The Question of Psychological Types: The Correspondence of C.G. Jung and Hans Schmid-Guisan, 1915–1916 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013]; Jung, Psychological Types, 164; Bair, Jung, 278–85).

  “I am reading Jung”: To Oberholzer, June 17, 1921.

  “I am now reading Jung’s Types”: To Oberholzer, November 15, 1921.

  “I really want to have”: To Burri, November 5, 1921.

  “I have to agree with Jung”: To Roemer, January 28, 1922.

  “I thought at first that Jung’s types”: To Burri, November 5, 1921. Rorschach found the Introverted Feeling, Introverted Sensation, and Extraverted Intuition types “especially dubious,” and these are in fact less convincing than the other five—precisely as might have been predicted from Jung’s personality. Jung, C. G. Jung Speaking, 435–46; Jung, Introduction to Jungian Psychology; Jung’s letter to Sabina Spielrein, October 7, 1919, which diagrams his, Freud’s, Bleuler’s, Nietzsche’s, Goethe’s, Schiller’s, Kant’s, and Schopenhauer’s positions on the axes of Thinking/Feeling and Sensing/Intuiting (Coline Covington and Barbara Wharton, Sabina Spielrein: Forgotten Pioneer of Psychoanalysis [New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2003], 57; important passages are quoted in Jung and Schmid-Guisan, Question of Psychological Types, 31–32).

  too inclined or too disinclined: PD, 26, 75, 78.

  “My method is still in its infancy”: To Hans Prinzhorn (see in note “pioneering study of art and mental illness” on this page), perhaps Rorschach’s last letter.

  able to influence the content: To Roemer, January 27, 1922.

  “A general view”: PD, 192, from the 1922 essay.

  “All my work has shown me”: To Roemer, June 1921.

  patients at the Deaf-Mute Clinic: To Ulrich Grüninger, March 10, 1922; to Roemer, March 15, 1922.

  Chapter 13: Right on the Threshold to a Better Future

  On Sunday, March 26: Olga to Paul, April 8 and April 18, 1922; WSI; Dr. Koller’s medical report (L, 441–42); Ellenberger.

  “He suddenly said to me”: April 8, 1922.

  “awestruck”: Rorschach had sent Pfister a detailed blind diagnosis, and he replied: “What fine work! I am awestruck at the accuracy of your judgment” (February 10, 1922).

  “yesterday we lost”: Pfister, Psycho-Analysis and Faith, emended. Freud replied with a certain ambivalence, on April 6 (in ibid.): “Rorschach’s death is very sad. I shall write a few words to his widow to-day. My impression is that perhaps you overrate him as an analyst; I note with pleasure from your letter the high esteem in which you hold him as a man.”

  “I found in him a seeking”: HR 1:4.

  When Ludwig Binswanger published an essay: In CE, 234–47.

  Chapter 14: The Inkblots Come to America

  David Mordecai Levy: 1892–1977. See David M. Levy Papers, Oskar Diethelm Library, DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry, esp. Box 1; the biography in American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 8.4 (1938): 769–70; David M. Levy, “Beginnings of the Child Guidance Movement,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 38.5 (1968): 799–804; David Shakow, “The Development of Orthopsychiatry,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 38.5 (1968): 804–9; obituaries in American Journal of Psychiatry 134.8 (1977): 934 and New York Times, March 4, 1977; Samuel J. Beck, “How the Rorschach Came to America,” JPA 36.2 (1972): 105–8.

  stepping down for a year abroad: Bruno Klopfer and Douglas McGlashan Kelley, The Rorschach Technique: A Manual for a Projective Method of Personality Diagnosis (Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book, 1942; 2nd ed., 1946), 6.

  Levy published Rorschach’s essay: Hermann Rorschach and E. Oberholzer, “The Application of the Interpretation of Form to Psychoanalysis,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 60 (1924): 225–48. The translator is not credited, but the timing, Levy’s relationship with the journal, his fluent German and Rorschach expertise, and the notes in his copy of Psychodiagnostik (David M. Levy Papers) make it very likely that the translation was his. According to Exner, Levy in 1926 published a translation as “the first publication concerning the Rorschach to appear in an American journal”: the description fits except for the date (ExRS, 7).

  first US seminar: In 1925 (M. R. Hertz, “Rorschachbound: A 50-Year Memoir,” JPA 50.3 [1986]: 396–416).

  champion in Switzerland: Roland Kuhn (see also this page–this page and note on this page “For a period” above).

  advocate in England: Theodora Alcock (see R. S. McCully, “Miss Theodora Alcock, 1888–1980,” JPA 45.2 (1981): 115, and Justine McCarthy Woods, “The History of the Rorschach in the United Kingdom,” Rorschachiana 29 (2015): 64–80.

  most popular psychological test in Japan: Yuzaburo Uchida (see Kenzo Sorai and Keiichi Ohnuki, “The Development of the Rorschach in Japan,” Rorschachiana 29 (2015): 38–63.

  on the rise in Turkey: Tevfika İkiz, “The History and Development of the Rorschach Test in Turkey,” Rorschachiana 32.1 (2011): 72–90. Franziska Minkovska, a pioneer of the French Rorschach, worked with Jewish children during and after the Holocaust; see note “Franziska Minkovska” on this page below.

  in the United States: On the early history of the Rorschach in America, see ExRS; ExCS (1974), 8–9; John E. Exner, et al., “History of the Society,” in History and Directory: Society for Personality Assessment Fiftieth Anniversary (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989), 3–54. Wood, 48–83, is thorough but polemical.

  Psychotherapists, having worked: Ellenberger, Discovery, 896.

  “It comes out of two different approaches”: To Roemer, June 18, 1921.

  The two most influential: Their initial feud is in Samuel J. Beck, “Problems of Further Research in the Rorschach Test,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 5.2 (1935): 100–115; Beck, Introduction to the Rorschach Method: A Manual of Personality Study (New York: American Orthopsychiatric Association, 1937); Bruno Klopfer, “The Present Status of the Theoretical Development of the Rorschach Method,” RRE 1 (1937): 142–47; Beck, “Some Present Rorschach Problems,” RRE 2 (1937): 15–22; Klopfer, “Discussion on ‘Some Recent [sic] Rorschach Problems,’ ” RRE 2 (1937): 43–44, in an issue of Klopfer’s journal that includes ten articles arguing against Beck; Klopfer, “Personality Aspects Revealed by the Rorschach Method,” RRE 4 (1940): 26–29; Klopfer, Rorschach Technique (1942); Beck, review of Klopfer’s Rorschach Technique, in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 11 (1942): 583–87; Beck, Rorschach’s Test, vol. 1 (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1944).

  Later reflections: Beck, “The Rorsc
hach Test: A Multi-dimensional Test of Personality,” in An Introduction to Projective Techniques and Other Devices for Understanding the Dynamics of Human Behavior, ed. Harold H. Anderson and Gladys L. Anderson (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1951); oral history interview with Beck, April 28, 1969, Archives of the History of American Psychology, University of Akron, Ohio; Beck, “How the Rorschach Came”; editorial, Silver Anniversary Issue honoring Bruno Klopfer, JPT 24.3 (1960); Pauline G. Vorhaus, “Bruno Klopfer: A Biographical Sketch,” JPT 24.3 (1960): 232–37; Evelyn Hooker, “The Fable,” JPT 24.3 (1960): 240–45. Also: John E. Exner’s obituary for Beck, American Psychologist 36.9 (1981): 986–87; K. W. Bash, “Masters of Shadows,” JPA 46.1 (1982): 3–6; Leonard Handler, “Bruno Klopfer, a Measure of the Man and His Work,” JPA 62.3 (1994): 562–77, “John Exner and the Book That Started It All,” JPA 66.3 (1996): 650–58, and “A Rorschach Journey with Bruno Klopfer,” JPA 90.6 (2008): 528–35. Annie Murphy Paul, The Cult of Personality (New York: Free Press, 2004), has original material on Klopfer and Beck but is unreliable on Rorschach.

  fall of 1927: Beck, Introduction to the Rorschach Method, ix.

  “I saw some of the best”: Oral history interview with Beck, quoted in Paul, Cult of Personality, 27.

  “by scientific method”: Ibid.

  “make up through his keen thinking”: Vorhaus, “Bruno Klopfer.”

  popular weekly radio program: Handler, “Rorschach Journey,” 534.

  his eight-year-old son: Paul, Cult of Personality, 25.

  In business-friendly Switzerland: Ellenberger, 208.

  voluble conversations: Molly Harrower, describing where she met Klopfer in October 1937, in Exner et al., “History of the Society,” 8.

  a hundred subscribers: “Retrospect and Prospect,” RRE 2 (July 1937): 172.

  “does not reveal a behavior picture”: Klopfer, “Personality Aspects Revealed,” 26.

  “a fluoroscope into the psyche”: Beck, “Multi-dimensional Test,” 101 and 104; Beck, Introduction to the Rorschach Method, 1.

  “Once the response has been finally judged”: Beck, “Some Present Rorschach Problems,” 16.

  Klopfer, while he agreed: ExRS, 21.

  “combined, to a marked degree”: Klopfer, Rorschach Technique, 3.

  “knew the value of free association”: Beck, “The Rorschach Test: A Multi-dimensional Test,” 103.

  “Rorschach was able to handle”: Beck, review of Klopfer, Rorschach Technique, 583.

  “a student trained in”: Ibid.

  “does not seem consistent”: Beck, “Some Present Rorschach Problems,” 19–20.

  “little influence deriving from”: Beck, Rorschach’s Test, vol. 1, xi.

  Students at Klopfer’s workshops: Exner et al., “History of the Society,” 22.

  In the summer of 1954: Handler, “John Exner,” 651–52.

  “awe those around him”: Exner, obituary for Beck. Beck’s later writing, especially the Experience Actual score, which reflects the subject’s “inner state as total psychological vitality,” enters quite speculative territory.

  One of her innovations: ExRS, 158.

  she has since been called the conscience: ExRS, 27, 42.

  Her first article in Klopfer’s: “The Normal Details in the Rorschach Ink-Blot Tests,” RRE 1.4 (1937): 104–14.

  she cautioned Beck: “Rorschach: Twenty Years After,” RRE 5.3 (1941): 90–129.

  “far more flexible”: In Exner et al., “History of the Society,” 14.

  Her most dramatic effort: Marguerite R. Hertz and Boris B. Rubenstein, “A Comparison of Three ‘Blind’ Rorschach Analyses,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 9.2 (1939): 295–314. Technically, as she points out, her own analysis was “partially blind,” since she administered the test in person, knowing only the subject’s age. She offers all the necessary caveats: this exercise did not validate test procedures, or whether the Rorschach reveals personality structures, and of course many further studies are needed. But “the marked correspondence in these records can only be interpreted as positive findings.” Within the field, this was a “famous confrontation” (Ernest R. Hilgard, Psychology in America: A Historical Survey [San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987], 516).

  Hertz got a phone call: ExRS, 26–27 and 157, quoting personal correspondence from Hertz and reporting that “the manuscript was nearly completed.” The date of the disaster is unclear—either 1937 or 1940 (“Hertz, Marguerite Rosenberg,” Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, last modified 1997, ech.​case.​edu/​cgi/​article.​pl?id=HMR; Douglas M. Kelley, “Report of the First Annual Meeting of the Rorschach Institute Inc.,” RRE 4.3 [1940]: 102–3).

  apparently willing to let Klopfer: ExRS, 44.

  By 1940: Kelley, “Survey of the Training Facilities for the Rorschach Method in the U.S.A.,” RRE 4.2 (1940): 84–87; Exner et al., “History of the Society,” 16.

  At Sarah Lawrence: Ruth Munroe, “The Use of the Rorschach in College Guidance,” RRE 4.3 (1940): 107–30.

  “a permanent reservoir”: Ruth Munroe, “Rorschach Findings on College Students Showing Different Constellations of Subscores on the A. C. E.” (1946), in A Rorschach Reader, ed. Murray H. Sherman (New York: International Universities Press, 1960), 261.

  Chapter 15: Fascinating, Stunning, Creative, Dominant

  a shift: Defined by Warren I. Susman in “ ‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth-Century Culture,” chap. 14 of Culture As History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984). His formulation, together with the examples in Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), have since been used across disciplines as the basis for a range of arguments; Susan Cain, for instance, uses them to argue that the culture of personality privileges extravert types (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking [New York: Crown, 2012], 21–25).

  One classic study: Marchand, Advertising the American Dream.

  “As late as 1915”: Alfred Kroeber quoted in Hallowell, “Psychology and Anthropology” (1954), repr. in Contributions to Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 163–209.

  1939 essay: Reprinted in Rorschach Science: Readings in Theory and Method, ed. Michael Hirt (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), 31–52; see also Frank, “Toward a Projective Psychology,” JPT 24 (September 1960): 246–53.

  Lawrence K. Frank: Obituary, New York Times, September 24, 1968; Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 177. As president of the Macy Foundation, he agreed to sponsor the first academic conference that brought together academic psychologists and clinicians using the Rorschach, in 1941 (Exner et al., “History of the Society,” 17).

  “The self does not know”: Markov, Russian Futurism, 5. Also quoted above on page 95.

  Thematic Apperception Test: First published in Christiana D. Morgan and Henry A. Murray, “A Method for Investigating Fantasies: The Thematic Apperception Test,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 34.2 (1935): 289–306. The TAT still has its advocates today and is used relatively widely, subject to various multicultural updates including a “Black Thematic Apperception Test” and a set of images for the elderly.

  I see a wolf: Galison makes a similar point: “In the world of Rorschach’s inkblots, subjects make objects, of course: ‘I see a woman,’ ‘I see a wolf’s head.’ But objects also make subjects: ‘depressive,’ ‘schizophrenic’ ” (258–59).

  assumed that we have a creative: The Rorschach “both reflected this new interiority [of the self] and, more actively, provided a powerful assessment procedure, a universally recognized visual sign, and a compelling central metaphor” (Galison 291).

  Prior to 1920: This history is paraphrased from Hallowell, “Psychology and Anthropology,” and “The Rorschach Technique in the Study of Personality and Culture,” American
Anthropologist 47.2 (1945): 195–210.

  “was the relation between”: Quoted in Hallowell, “Psychology and Anthropology,” 191.

  second person to bring: Beck, “How the Rorschach Came,” 107.

  The Bleulers’ 1935 essay: M. Bleuler and R. Bleuler, “Rorschach’s Ink-Blot Test and Racial Psychology: Mental Peculiarities of Moroccans,” Journal of Personality 4.2 (1935): 97–114. The journal itself is a revealing artifact of the time, filled with handwriting analyses, tests of twins separated at birth, and cross-cultural comparisons. It was originally a dual-language journal, called Charakter in German and Character and Personality in English, and the opening article of issue 1 (1932), William McDougall’s “Of the Words Character and Personality,” is rich in evidence for the shift from character to personality discussed above.

  easier said than done: Samuel Beck criticized precisely this call for empathy, saying that what the test needed was fixed standards, not more subjectivity (“Autism in Rorschach Scoring: A Feeling Comment,” Character and Personality 5 [1936]: 83–85, cited in ExRS, 16).

  Cora Du Bois: 1903–91. The People of Alor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1944). There is now a biography: Susan C. Seymour, Cora Du Bois: Anthropologist, Diplomat, Agent (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

  “The crux of matters”: Quoted in Seymour, Cora Du Bois, ebook.

  Could anything useful be learned: Emil Oberholzer, “Rorschach’s Experiment and the Alorese,” in Du Bois, People of Alor, 588. Responses below from 638.

  Any such argument would be circular: George Eaton Simpson, Sociologist Abroad (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1959), 83–84.

  An EEG: John M. Reisman, A History of Clinical Psychology (New York: Irvington, 1976), 222.