Moth, bat, monster – what might this be? More than a century after Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach first shared his ink blots with the world, they’re still helping us see what we would hardly dare reveal.
It’s 1921. As the postwar celebrations wind down, the wounds of WWI are just beginning to heal. Swiss-born artist Paul Klee has just taken up a position at the Bauhaus, where he will begin to build his reputation as the “father of abstract art”. And in the town of Herisau, in Switzerland’s canton Appenzell Ausserrhoden, Rorschach writes Psychodiagnostik, one of the strangest psychological manuals ever known.
“What’s with all these pictures?” Rorschach’s contemporaries might have wondered. This was at the height of Freud and psychoanalysis. Rorschach’s dissertation advisor, psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, also taught Carl Jung and did experiments in word association. Amidst all this talk therapy, Rorschach gravitated towards strange blobs of ink on paper.
Inspired by klecksography
But he always had. As a youth, his nickname was Klecks – “ink blot” – because of his particular fascination with the phenomenon. In the days before ballpoint pens, spilled and blotted ink was a common risk for any writer. And in the mid nineteenth century, a German doctor named Justinian Kerner published Klecksographien, a book of poetry illustrated with ink blots elaborated into fanciful people and animals. It was a sort of parlour game in the time of Kleck’s childhood: look at the ink blot and tell me what you see.
It fascinated Rorschach, whose art teacher father had always encouraged him to pursue art. Rorschach wanted to understand not just what people saw in ink blots, but why and how. He started his studies of inkblot perception on children, and then moved onto adults, while he finished his dissertation and took over the position of assistant director at the regional psychiatric hospital in Herisau.
Taking the test
After designing and testing out 300 different ink blots, Rorschach settled on 10 and fixed a sequence for administering them, always starting with the question, “What might it be?”. They are puzzling images of nearly mirror symmetry, some in black and white and others in a range of colour. Some see animals or people. Others, frightful monsters. It’s what’s called a projective test, designed to assess the meanings we project onto ambiguous input, and perhaps related to our natural propensity to try to recognize patterns and seek meaning from randomness.
But interestingly, what you say each ink blot looks like is of less importance than how you approach the task. Do you focus on the whole blot or just part? On the colour or the shape? Or do you shut down when faced with the challenge of making sense of it? After describing what you see, and then revisiting the images to talk about your thought process, your responses will be assessed according to a complex coding system based on normative answers.
Perhaps surprisingly, Rorschach designed his test to do one thing: test for schizophrenia, a now common term that, like autism, his teacher Bleuler had coined. In other words, it’s not a test of creativity, and it’s not a personality test – though in the years since Hermann’s death from an inflammation of the appendix in 1922, just after writing his book, the Rorschach test has been used for all that and more.
The past and future of ink blots
Over the past century, the test has been widely used throughout the world, with different “schools” shooting up in France, Japan and the US. It’s been challenged on many fronts, with accusations that it’s not sufficiently reliable or valid, it overdiagnoses pathology, it’s too Eurocentric, or maybe just a bit too reminiscent of the now unpopular Freudian psychoanalysis. But its enduring popularity has inspired new, more systemized, rigorous and validated versions of Rorschach’s wildly original invention. Yet another round of criticism in the early 2000s was refuted by a comprehensive review of test results in 2013, resulting in – for now at least – a strong case for the test’s continued use in psychotherapy.
No one test can tell even the most astute doctor anything – and the Rorschach inkblot test may live on as one more tool in the psychologist’s toolkit. From the same fertile soil that nurtured advancements in not just psychological theory but also abstract art, Klecks’s little inkblots continue to fascinate and help us understand the human mind a century after their invention.