connection to the Rorschach: L. Giromini et al., “The Feeling of Movement: EEG Evidence for Mirroring Activity During the Observations of Static, Ambiguous Stimuli in the Rorschach Cards,” Biological Psychology 85.2 (2010): 233–41. Robert Vischer, in 1871, had already pinpointed many phenomena that mirror neurons would be used to explain: “The suggestive facial expression [we see] is inwardly carried out or repeated”; “There is a very real and intimate connection between [touch and vision]…: The child learns to see by touching,” etc. (“Optical Sense of Form,” 105, 94).
Further studies of the Rorschach: J. A. Pineda et al., “Mu Suppression and Human Movement Responses to the Rorschach Test,” NeuroReport 22.5 (2011): 223–26; Porcelli et al., “Mirroring Activity”; A. Ando et al., “Embodied Simulation and Ambiguous Stimuli: The Role of the Mirror Neuron System,” Brain Research 1629 (2015): 135–42, all available on the R-PAS Library web page.
remains controversial: One critical account, by a coauthor of What’s Wrong with the Rorschach? was positively reviewed by a cocreator of the R-PAS: Sally L. Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (New York: Basic Books, 2013); Dumitrascu and Mihura, review of Satel and Lilienfeld, Brainwashed, in Rorschachiana 36.1 (2015): 404–6.
Other recent experiments: Iacoboni, Mirroring People, 145 and passim.
Empathy has been even more discussed: Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Science of Evil (New York: Basic Books, 2011) argued that the notion of evil should be replaced with “empathy erosion.” Also Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test (New York: Riverhead, 2011); Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014).
Paul Bloom: “The Baby in the Well,” New Yorker, May 20, 2013, and “Against Empathy,” Boston Review, September 10, 2014, www.bostonreview.net/forum/paul-bloom-against-empathy, a forum with responses by Leslie Jamison, Simon Baron-Cohen, Peter Singer, and others.
Stephen Finn’s work: Finn, “The Many Faces of Empathy in Experiential, Person-Centered, Collaborative Assessment,” JPA 91.1 (2009): 20–23. This was an essay honoring Paul Lerner, who pioneered a psychoanalytic use of the Rorschach and himself saw empathy as the “heart” of the examiner’s process.
Chapter 24: The Rorschach Test Is Not a Rorschach Test
Dr. Randall Ferriss: Name and identifying details changed.
Irena Minkovska: WSI. She said the other blots are “lively.”
Franziska Minkovska: After working under Bleuler in Zurich and writing an important study of schizophrenia, she turned to the Rorschach test, developing an intuitive, emotional-centered system of her own (Le Rorschach: À la recherche du monde des formes [Bruges: De Brouwer, 1956]). The eulogy by her brother-in-law contains amazing details of her survival in Nazi Paris as a Polish Jew and her daily walks through the city, wearing the yellow star, to the hospital where she administered the Rorschach to epileptics and children. “She used her own personal method of direct emotional rapport and empathy….Along with scoring and quantitatively interpreting the answers according to Rorschach’s classical method, Minkovska paid special attention to how the test subject picked up the card and held or moved it, as well as how he used language, his sentence constructions, use of time words, and the shifts in reactions and behavior during the test itself, and drew her conclusions from these elements.” According to another eulogy, by her widower: “She always spoke reverently of Rorschach’s ideas, his essential insight about exploring the world of visual forms, with the ‘deeply held conviction’ that she was staying true to them” (Mieczyslav Minkovski, Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychiatrie 68 [1952]: 413; Eugène Minkovski, talk at the Burghölzli, January 26, 1951, in Dr. Françoise Minkowska: In Memoriam [Paris: Beresniak, 1951], 58–74, 71).
people often do have startled responses: Schachtel suggested it likely had as much to do with “a sudden unexpected change” in the test as with color per se (Experiential Foundations, 48).
In Wood’s telling (153–54, 289, 36–37), “The idea of Color Shock began to crumble” in 1949; several other studies in the fifties left the notion “discredited”; color shock was “shown to be useless” (“unimpressive,” “generally dismal”), he concluded, citing the 1993 edition of Exner’s manual. Exner, on the page cited, was actually addressing Rorschach’s wider point—that Color responses are linked to emotional reactions. “Unfortunately, much of that controversy has not focused on” the general issue, “but rather on the concept of ‘color-shock.’ ” Studies of the color-emotion theory as a whole, Exner claimed, “have generally been supportive of the concept” (ExCS, 421; cf. a 1999 overview of the research by Helge Malmgren, “Colour Shock: Does It Exist, and Does It Depend on Colour?,” captainmnemo.se/ro/hhrotex/rotexcolour.pdf.
A long essay: Gamboni.
Inventing Abstraction: The essay is Peter Galison, “Concrete Abstraction,” in Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, ed. Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 350–57. He is the author of “Image of Self” and co-organizer of a 2012 exhibition at the Harvard Science Center, “X-Rays of the Soul,” connecting the inkblots in psychology to their role in the wider culture.
countless visual connections: Studies of the inkblots are flourishing elsewhere outside of science as well. A superb 2011 book on Justinus Kerner’s inkblots, Friedrich Weltzien’s Fleck—Das Bild der Selbsttätigkeit [Blot—The Image of Self-Making], links Kerner’s claim that his blots came over from the other world to the idea of something that makes itself, which was central to nineteenth-century thought across a huge range of disciplines: photography as “the picture which makes itself”; self-registering instruments like seismographs; industrial automation (the dream of products that manufacture themselves) along with its dark double, automation out of control (the fable of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, written in 1797). Evolution was a theory of “the life force”; in Hegel, the world-spirit unfolded itself through time, an idea recast by Schopenhauer’s striving will and Nietzsche’s will to power.
“the place where our brain and the universe meet”: Quoted by Paul Klee, in turn by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (“Eye and Mind” in The Primacy of Perception [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964], 180).
85 percent: Stephen Apkon, The Age of the Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 75, no source cited.
“the negative space”: Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are When We Think No One’s Looking (New York: Crown, 2014), 158–69.
Barack Obama: Quoted by Peter Baker in a postelection article, “Whose President Is He Anyway?,” New York Times, November 15, 2008. Baker goes on: “The Rorschach part may fade with the end of the campaign but the test part is here.”
the metaphor has shifted: Douglas Preston, “The El Dorado Machine,” New Yorker, May 6, 2013; Lauren Tabach-Bank, “Jeff Goldblum, Star of the Off-Broadway Play ‘Domesticated,’ ” T Magazine, New York Times, December 18, 2013.
“ends up being given wrongly”: Caroline Hill (pseudonym), interview, January 2014.
judges regularly grant parole: “I Think It’s Time We Broke for Lunch…,” Economist, April 14, 2011; Binyamin Appelbaum, “Up for Parole? Better Hope You’re First on the Docket,” Economix (New York Times blog), April 14, 2011, economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/time-and-judgment.
Finally, Card I: Gary Klien, “Girl Gets $8 Million in Marin Molest Case,” Marin Independent Journal, August 12, 2006; Peter Fimrite, “Teen Gets $8.4 Million in Alleged Abuse Case,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 12, 2006; Dr. Robin Press and Basia Kaminska, personal communication, 2015.
clear everyday language: Gacone and Evans, Handbook, 7.
Appendix
After Hermann Rorschach’s death: Blum/Witschi, 72–83.
twenty-five francs: Ellenberger, 194.
H.R.’s development: The second half of Olga R, © 1965, Verlag Hans Huber Bern. Translated
and included here with the kind permission of Hogrefe Verlag Bern.
Rorschach Test inkblots are reproduced from the 1921 first printing: the set mounted on yellow paper and given by Hermann Rorschach to Hans Behn-Eschenburg; in the Wolfgang Schwarz Archive, used by permission.
All other images not listed below are from the Archiv und Sammlung Hermann Rorschach, University Library of Bern, Switzerland, used by permission. Many are duplicated in the Wolfgang Schwarz Archive, now incorporated into the Hermann Rorschach Archive.
1: Photo © Rudy Pospisil, rudy@rudypospisil.com. Used by permission.
2: Plates 70 and 58 from Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen in Natur (Leipzig and Vienna, 1904), engraved by Adolf Giltsch after Haeckel’s drawings.
3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9: Reproduced from the photo album (StATG 9′10 1.7) in the Staatsarchiv, Canton of Thurgau, Frauenfeld, Switzerland, used by permission.
10: Justinus Kerner, from the posthumously published Klecksographien (Stuttgart, 1890).
11: Wilhelm Busch, “Forte vivace” and “Fortissimo vivacissimo,” from Der Virtuos: Ein Neujahrskonzert (Munich, 1865).
12: Giacomo Balla (Italian, 1871–1958). Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash), 1912. Oil on canvas, 35⅜ × 43¼ inches. Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery; Bequest of A. Conger Goodyear and Gift of George F. Goodyear, 1964 (1964:16). © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ SIAE, Rome. Photograph by Tom Loonan.
13: Plate 8 from Szymon Hens, Phantasieprüfung mit formlosen Klecksen bei Schulkindern, normalen Erwachsenen und Geisteskranken (Zurich, 1917).
14: Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror, dir. Robert Siodmak (Universal Pictures, 1946).
15: Bal de Tete perfume ad, 1956.
16: Usage of “Rorschach” in English, from Google Ngram, accessed May 2016.
17: Figures 2, 3, 5, and 6 from Rudolf Arnheim, “Perceptual Analysis of a Rorschach Card” (1953), in Toward a Psychology of Art (University of California Press, paperback 1972), 92–94. © University of California Press.
18: Andy Warhol, Rorschach (1984). Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 20 × 16 inches. © 2016 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.
19: Figure 1 from Barry Dauphin and Harold H. Greene, “Here’s Looking at You: Eye Movement Exploration of Rorschach Images.” Reproduced with permission from Rorschachiana 33(1):3–22. © 2012 Hogrefe Publishing, www.hogrefe.com, DOI: 10.1027/1192-5604/a000025.
20: © Can Stock Photo Inc.
21: Figures 3 and 4 from 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. © John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Reprinted by permission.
22: Jackson Pollock (American; Cody, Wyoming, 1912–1956 East Hampton, New York), Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950. Enamel on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, George A. Hearn Fund, 1957 (57.92). © 2016 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
DAMION SEARLS has written for Harper’s, n+1, and The Paris Review, and translated authors including Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, and five Nobel Prize winners. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Cullman Center fellowships.
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The Inkblots Page 48