The Inkblots

Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was one of the most famous scientists in the world. A recent biographer writes that “more people learned of evolutionary theory through his voluminous publications than through any other source,” including Darwin’s own work; The Origin of Species sold fewer than forty thousand copies in thirty years, while Haeckel’s popularization The Riddle of the Universe sold more than six hundred thousand in German alone, as well as being translated into languages from Sanskrit to Esperanto. Gandhi himself wanted to translate it into Gujarati, believing it “the scientific antidote to the deadly wars of religion plaguing India.” Aside from popularizing Darwin, Haeckel’s scientific accomplishments included naming thousands of species—3,500 after just one of his polar expeditions—correctly predicting where fossils of the “missing link” between man and ape would be found, formulating the concept of ecology, and pioneering embryology. His theory that the development of the individual retraces the development of the species—“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—was enormously inflvential in both biology and popular culture. 

Haeckel was also an artist. An aspiring landscape painter in his youth, he eventually combined art and science in luxuriously illus trated works. Darwin praised Haeckel on both counts, calling his breakthrough two-volume book “the most magnificent works which I have ever seen” and his Natural History of Creation “one of the most remarkable books of our time.” Art Forms in Nature, which Rorschach used to illustrate his Scaphvasia talk, was a visual compendium of structure and symmetry throughout the natural world, suggesting harmonies between amoebae, jellyfish, crystals, and all sorts of higher forms. Published in book form in 1904, though the hundred illustrations were originally published in ten sets of ten between 1899 and 1904, it was popular and influential in both science and art, creating a kind of visual vocabulary for Art Nouveau while superimposing that vision onto nature. The fact that horizontally symmetrical forms look “organic” to us is partly a legacy of his way of seeing. Art Forms in Nature was a household showpiece in German-speaking Europe and beyond; the Rorschachs surely owned at least some of the illustrations. 

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It was Bleuler who named the disease schizophrenia—his most well-known contribution to science, along with inventing the terms autism depth psychology, and ambivalence. He did this because Kraepelin’s earlier label, dementia praecox, means “early-onset loss of mind,” something biological and irreversible, whereas “a split mind” (the meaning of schizopbrenta) is not hopelessly lost: it may still have functioning, living powers. Bleuler also wrote that he wanted a new term because there is no way to use dementia praecox as an adjective. In his view, illness should not be a medical object—a noun in Latin—but one way among many to describe a particular, human sufferer. 

This empathy for patients had personal roots: when Bleuler was seventeen, his sister had developed catatonia and was hospitalized near their village at the Burghdlzli. The family was outraged at brain doctors who seemed, as the locals said, more interested in microscopes than people and who couldn’t even speak her language. Bleuler decided, or in some versions of the story his mother inspired him, to become a psychiatrist who could truly understand his patients. While he never wrote or spoke publicly about his sister Anna-Paulina’s illness, her decisive influence on him is undeniable. One of Bleuler’s assistants at the Burghdlzli in 1907 and 1908 recalled: “Bleuler often told us that even the most serious catatonics can be influenced by verbal persuasion. He gave his own sister as an example. ... One time, Bleuler had to get her to leave the building while she was in a state of acute excitement. He refused to use force and. . . talked to her for hours and hours, until eventually she put on her clothes and left with him. Bleuler used this example as proof that verbal persuasion was possible.” 

She lived with him in his apartment at the Burghdlzli for almost thirty years, from their parents’ death in 1898 until her death in 1926. His assistant recalled: “I could see her monotonously pacing back and forth all day long from my room across the hall. Bleuler’s children were very young at the time, and they did not seem to notice his sister. Whenever they wanted to climb up anywhere, they simply used her like an inanimate object, like a chair. She showed no reaction whatsoever, no emotional relationship at all with the children.” Bleuler had lived face to face with extreme schizophrenia for decades before the term existed, and during his entire career at the Burghdlzli he had a living example of the schizophrenic’s humanity right there in the room. His pioneering efforts began at home. 

Of course, every generation sets out to correct the mistakes of the previous one; psychiatrists regularly accuse their predecessors of being heartless or at least misguided. In fact, psychiatrists before Bleuler, from Forel to Kraepelin to the father of brain-centered psychiatry, Wilhelm Griesinger, were by all accounts sympathetic and caring doctors too. But the Burghdlzli truly was different. Bleuler’s assistant re~ calls: “The way they looked at the patient, the way they examined him, was almost like a revelation. They did not simply classify the Patient. They took his hallucinations, one by one, and tried to determine what each meant, and just why the patient had these particular delusions. To me, that was altogether new and revealing.” The transformation toward patient-centered care didn’t start at the Burghdlzli, or end there but Biculer mentored generations of psychiatrists, both students ang assistants—including his son Manfred, Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein, two of Rorschach’s later bosses, and Rorschach himself. If it is unthinkable today that a psychiatrist would be unable to speak his patient’s language, that is largely thanks to Eugen Bleuler. 

Carl JUNG ARRIVED at the Burghdlzli in December 1900, to work as Bleuler’s assistant. He set about becoming the prominent, then preeminent, figure who would repeatedly transform the field of psycholgy in the decades to come. 

Starting in 1902, Jung and the Burghdlzli’s other assistant doctor, Franz Riklin, developed the first experimental method to reveal patterns in the unconscious: the word association test. Subjects were read a list of a hundred prompt-words and were asked to say the first thing that came into their heads, while the doctor timed their responses with a stopwatch; then they went through the list again and were asked to remember their initial responses. Any aberrations—long delays, memory lapses during the second round, surprising non sequiturs, getting “stuck” and repeating responses—could be explained only by unconscious acts of memory and repression, a kind of hidden black hole pulling and warping the person’s answers toward concealed desires, of prompting feints in the opposite direction. Jung called these hiddes centers “complexes.” The test found, empirically, that most of them were sexual. 

With this, the Burghdélzli doctors had made an “unprecedented and extraordinary” discovery. Independent of Freud—and doing something entirely unlike letting a neurotic ramble on a couch—they had suc’ ceeded in producing concrete proof of unconscious processes at work, in “normal” people no less than in the mentally ill. They immediately recognized that their results had confirmed Freud, and before long the word association test was being incorporated into psychoanalysis, a doctors improvised stimulus-words to pursue certain lines of thought or used the complexes they found as starting points for therapy. The method had tremendous potential in criminology. Jung and Riklin had created the modern psychological test. 

What erupted next at the Burghdélzli was nothing less than an orgy of testing, with doctors stopwatching, dream-interpreting, and psychoanalyzing their patients, their wives, their children, one another, themselves. They jumped on every sign of the unconscious they could find: every slip of the tongue or pen, lapse of memory, absentmindedly hummed tune. For years, “that was how we got to know one another,” Bleuler wrote. His oldest child, Manfred (born in 1903), and Jung’s oldest, Agathe (born a year later), both recalled feeling under total psychoanalytic observation as children. Publications on the word association experiment included anonymized results from Bleuler, Bleuler’s wife, her mother and sister, and Jung himself. 

Bleuler was thrilled by Freud’s discoveries and immediately wanted to use them to help the deeply psychotic, not merely private patients suffering from sexual complexes. Before long, he found the results compelling enough that he reached out to Freud. He took the occasion of a 1904 book review to speak out as forcefully as he could, saying that Freud’s Studies on Hysteria and Interpretation of Dreams had “opened up a new world”—a powerful endorsement from one of the leading psychiatrists in Europe. Then he wrote to Freud personally: “Dear Honored Colleague! We here in the Burghdlzli are fervent admirers of the Freudian theories in psychology and pathology.” As part of the rampaging self-analysis at the Burghdlzli, he even mailed Freud several of his own dreams, asking for tips on how to interpret them. 

The news of Bleuler’s fervent admiration was one of the most heartening letters Freud would ever get, and the first sign Freud saw of his theory’s acceptance in academic circles. It may have been what inspired him to end his multiyear hiatus from writing and produce the three great works he would publish in 1905 (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Fokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria). Freud crowed to his friends: “An absolutely stunning acknowledgment of my point of view. ... Just think: an official Full Professor of Psychiatry and my +++ Hysteria and Dream studies, always invoked with disgust and loathing up until now!” (Three crosses were chalked on the front doors of peasant houses to ward off danger and evil—Freud used them in his letters to ironically indicate horrifying, devilish things.) He wrote to Bleuler: “I am confident we will soon conquer psychiatry.” 

That “we” skimmed over something Freud knew perfectly well. Bleuler, at the pinnacle of professional psychiatry in Zurich, was far more important for Freudian ideas than vice versa. By making the Burghdlzli the first university psychiatric clinic in the world to use psy. choanalytic treatment methods, Bleuler and his assistants were the ones who brought Freud into professional medicine. Zurich, where Rorschach was studying, had replaced Vienna as the epicenter of the Freudian revolution. 

By 1906, the Burghdlzli was fully embroiled in the controversies around Freud’s ideas—what Freud called the “two warring worlds” of academic psychiatry and psychoanalysis. With the Jung-Riklin word association studies offering apparently ironclad proof of Freud’s theories, the anti-Freudians attacked. Gustav Aschaffenburg, the German psychiatrist who had taught Riklin how to perform the word association tests, delivered a fierce denunciation of Freud at a psychiatric convention and then published it. 

Bleuler had spoken up for Freud in 1904, two years earlier, but since then he had dared to ask some tough questions. Freud’s theory seemed extreme, Bleuler wrote—was everything rooted in sexuality? Where was the evidence Freud’s earlier work was so rich in? Surely Freud wasn't unscientifically generalizing about human nature from a single case? Bleuler found it productive to have one’s views challenged; not so Freud, who dismissed all of Bleuler’s reasonable doubts as resistance tO the great truth and turned his attention to Bleuler’s younger colleague. 

It was Jung, not Bleuler, who responded to Aschaffenburg in 1906—a devastating critique that did much to advance Freud’s reputation. Jung had already gone over Bleuler’s head to write to Freud, slipping into his first letter that he had “published the case that first drew Bleuler’s attention to the existence of your principles, though at that time with vigorous resistance on his part.” The opposite was closer to the truth. Jung took the opportunity of his first personal meeting with Freud in 1907 to drive another wedge between the two older men and persuade Freud that he was Freud’s man in Zurich. 

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Rorschach used the word association test on patients and in criminal cases for years, even after Jung had largely left it behind, and he was inspired by Jung’s later work as well. Jung’s 1912 book Transformations and Symbols of the Libido would come to define the “Zurich School,” which extended psychoanalytic explorations to an enormous range of cultural phenomena, from Gnostic myths and religions to art and what would come to be called the collective unconscious. Jung had rejected Freud’s literalistic understanding of sex drives, seeing them instead more mythically and symbolically as the “life-energy” shared by sexuality, fire, the Sun. Rorschach, too, was “fascinated by archaic thought, myths, and the construction of mythologies,” according to Olga. “He pursued the traces of these ancient ideas in various patients, looked for analogies, and found, in the delusions of a sick Swiss farmer leading a hermit’s life, astounding allusions to the world of the Egyptian gods.” 

As with Freud’s ideas, Rorschach used Jung’s without falling entirely under their sway. Jung took sides: while he recognized that there were certainly physiological causes of mental illness, he was soon pointing out that most of his patients had unimpaired brains, or at least that there was no way to connect their psychological disturbances to the brain. “For this reason,” Jung said in January 1908 ina lecture at the Zutich Town Hall, “we have entirely abandoned the anatomical approach in our Zurich Clinic and have turned to the psychological investigation of mental disease.” Whether or not Rorschach attended this particular lecture, he absorbed its message. He paid his dues in hard science, doing solid anatomical research on the pineal gland in the brain, but he agreed that the future of psychiatry lay in finding ways to interpret the mind, not merely dissect the brain. 

But Rorschach was closest in spirit to the third great pioneer, who Was constitutionally unable to “entirely abandon” either the interpretative or the anatomical approach. If a disease is biological, Bleuler argued, then perhaps it should be treated irrespective of what the pa~ tient’s particular delusions or “secret story” might be. Rorschach, too, would continue to believe that psychology rested on a physiological basis—in his case, the nature of perception. 

Rorschach shared Bleuler’s modest social background, his humay interest in sufferers of serious mental illness, and an ability, which thei colleagues often lacked, to respect and learn from others even whik finding one’s own path. While Freud saw women as beings with mys. terious psychologies very different from “ours,” and Jung often wrote about women’s predominant interest in domesticity and tendency to use emotion over intellect, Rorschach—the high school champion of women’s rights—and Bleuler shared none of these prejudices and, more important, never built their theories around them. 

They also both matter-of-factly rejected paranormal psychology. Freud and Jung—as well as William James, Pierre Janet, Théodore Flournoy, and the other preeminent psychologists of the time—frequented séances and studied spiritual mediums, not as a hobby but because that was where they hoped to get access to the “subliminal” realm soon to be called the unconscious. Rorschach, like Bleuler, understood these practices in terms we would use today. Whe his sister Anna had mocked their grandmother for turning to spiritual ism, Hermann, in medical school, responded that “if an old persons upset and turns to spirits, she does so only because people don’t want her anymore. She tries to communicate with ghosts because she no longer has anyone alive who’s close to her. That is a situation of real, deeP tragedy, and nothing to get angry about.” 

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 Hermann Hesse called Kerner “curiously gifted, the author of a book in his youth that seems to have caught and gathered up all the radiant beams of the Romantic spirit.” 

Later in life, Kerner assembled a series of what he called Klecksograpbien “blotograms”), which he then captioned or paired with decidedly gloomy poems—three “Messenger of Death” poems, twenty-five “Hades Images,” eleven more “Hell Images,” and so on. Inkblot making was a kind of spiritual and spiritualist practice for Kerner. He telt that the images were “incursions of the spirit world,” like the Seeress's powers. The blots made themselves—magically, unconsciously, inevitably—while he merely “tempted them over” from the hidden world into our own, where they then inspired his poems. At one point, he called his inkblots “daguerreotypes of the invisible world.” 

The geographical proximity between Kerner and Rorschach and their common background in psychiatry have made many historians of psychiatry, and art, unable to resist assuming a connection between them. But well after developing his test, Rorschach was asked if he had heard of Kerner, who “apparently did experiments with blots, obviously of a necromantic not scientific sort,” and he answered: “I have heard of Kerner’s experiments but I would be very grateful if you could find me the relevant book. Perhaps some substantive things lie behind the necromancy after all.” He was aware of Kerner’s work in a general sense, but it did not influence his own. 

In any case, “klexography” was a common enough child’s game. Kerner himself had played at inkblots as a child; young Carl Jung had “filled a whole exercise book with ink blots and amused myself giving them fantastic interpretations.” Thoreau tried it too. A Russian woman in Rorschach’s circle recalled a game she had often played when young, where you write your first and last name in ink, fold the paper in half, and “see what your soul says,” and speculated that maybe this game had given him his idea. 

In psychology proper, inkblots had occasionally been used before as a way to measure the amount of imagination someone had, espe. cially schoolchildren. A French psychiatrist named Alfred Binet way the first to have had the idea, in 1895. For Binet, a person’s psychol. ogy consisted of ten capacities, including memory, attention, force of will, moral sentiments, suggestibility, and imagination. Each capacity could be measured with its own test—for example, someone's ability to reproduce a complicated geometric shape tested how good or bad their memory was. As for imagination: “After asking about the number of novels the person usually reads, the kind of pleasure he takes from them, his taste in theater, music, games, etc., one can proceed to direct experiments. Take a strange-shaped blot of ink on a white sheet of paper: some people will see nothing there; for others with a lively visual imagination (Leonardo da Vinci for example), the little inkblot will be full of shapes, and one can note down the kind and number of shapes the person sees.” If a subject saw one or two things, he didn't have much imagination; if he saw twenty, he had a lot. The question was how many things you could find in a random blot, not what a care fully designed blot could find in you. 

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...whether a hallucinated scythe in the neck, shapes from a carpet pressing into the brain, or turning into what you saw in a book? 

It was while studying the transformations of perception that Rorschach first used inkblots. 

Rorschach WAS FAR from the first psychologist to explore the connection between seeing and feeling. In the nineteenth century, “aesthetics” was a branch of psychology and aesthetic was a science word—meaning “related to sensation or perception”—along with its siblings anesthetic (a substance we take so we won't feel), synesthetic (combining the senses), and kinesthetic (the sensation of motion). There was a tradition of psychological aesthetics in this sense, quite separate from Freud’s or Bleuler’s psychiatry—until Rorschach, with his Zurich training, hallucinating patients, and interest in visual experience, brought the two together. 

The key figure in this tradition was Robert Vischer (1847-1933), who in 1871 wrote a philosophy dissertation that set out to explain how we can respond to abstract forms. Why do we feel elegance in two arcing lines, or balance, or converging forces—how can we feel anything at all when faced with seemingly empty and inanimate shapes? “What do a resplendent rainbow, the firmament above, or the earth below have to do with the dignity of my humanity? I can love all that lives, all that creeps and flies; such things are akin to me; but my kinship with the elements is too remote to require any kind of compassion on my part.” One possible answer is that when we hear music or see abstract shapes we are reminded of something else: our reactions rest on an association of ideas. But Vischer rejected this line of thought because it reduced works of art to their content, theme, or message. Music doesn’t just remind us of our mother putting us to sleep, or some other such concrete image or event—we respond to it as music. 

The only viable explanation, Vischer argued, is that we can feel emotion from a lifeless thing because we put the emotion into it first. “With an intuitive investment on our part,” he wrote, “we involuntarily tead our emotions into” these inhuman forms. Not just our emotions, our very selves: “We have the wonderful ability to project and incorpotate our own physical form” into those rainbows, those harmonious or battling lines. We lose our fixed identity but gain the ability to connect with the world: “I seem merely to adapt and attach myself to the object as one hand clasps another, and yet I am mysteriously transplanted and magically transformed into this Other.” Our selves, refound in the world, are what we respond to, feeling outward things as parts of us, 

Vischer’s idea of a back and forth between projecting the self and internalizing the world—what he called a “direct continuation of the external sensation into an internal one”—influenced generations o¢ philosophers, psychologists, and aesthetic theorists. To describe hi, radical new concept, he used the German word Einfuhlung, literally “feeling-in.” When psychological works influenced by Vischer began to be translated into English in the early twentieth century, the language needed a new term for this new idea, and translators invented the word empathy. 

It is pretty shocking to realize that empathy is barely a hundred years old, about the same age as X-rays and lie-detector tests. Talk of an “empathy gene” feels exciting because of the friction between timeless aspects of the human condition and cutting-edge science, but in fact, “empathy” is the newfangled part of the term: genes were discovered first. What the word empathy described was not new, of course, and the ideas of “sympathy” and “sensibility” had long and closely related histories, but “empathy” recast the relationship between self and world in a new way. It also comes as a surprise that the term was invented not to talk about altruism or acts of kindness, but to explain how we can enjoy a sonata or a sunset. Empathy, for Vischer, was creative seeing, reshaping the world so as to find ourselves reflected in it. 

In the English tradition, the exemplary empathizer in this sense was the Romantic poet John Keats, who could even enter into the lives of things. One recent critic summarizes Keats’s “gift for entering imaginatively into physical objects”: 

The way he hoisted himself up, looking “burly and dominant” when he first met Spenser’s description of “sea-shouldering whales”, or mimed the “pawing” of a dancing bear, or the rapid flurry of 3 boxer’s punches like “fingers tapping” on a windowpane. Or thos¢ famous moments of imaginative attention and empathy. “If a Sparsow come before my Window I take part in its existence and pick about the Gravel.” Or simply eating a ripe nectarine: “It went down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy—all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry.” Or even entering into the spirit of a billiard ball, so he could feel “a sense of delight from its own roundness, smoothness, volubility, & the rapidity of its motions.” 

These examples would fit seamlessly among Rorschach’s experiences. Keats, incidentally, was a medical student, followed the latest advances in neurology, and even on occasion integrated neuroscience into his poetry. The Swiss psychiatrist may have been far less effusive than the English Romantic, but underneath Hermanns reserve lay a John Keats, delighting in the world’s volubility & the rapidity of its motions—“the golden overflow of the world,” as Rorschach would often say, quoting his favorite line of poetry. 

Vischer had the same kind of experiences, likewise anticipating Rorschach’s. “When I observe a stationary object,” Vischer wrote, “I can without difficulty place myself within its inner structure, at its center of gravity. I can think my way into it,” feel “compressed and modest” when I see a star or flower, and “experience a feeling of mental grandeur and breadth” from a building, water, or air. “We can often observe in ourselves the curious fact that a visual stimulus is experienced not so much with our eyes as with a different sense in another part of our body. When I cross a hot street in the glaring sun and put ona pair of dark blue glasses, I have the momentary impression that my skin is being cooled off.” There is no ironclad evidence that Rorschach read Vischer, but he almost certainly did, undoubtedly read works influenced by him, and in any case perceived the world in a similar way. 

Decades before Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Vischer was tracing the same creative activity of the mind that Freud would describe, but in the opposite direction. Since Freud wanted to get at the underlying psychological content of dreams, starting from their bizarre, seemingly meaningless surface, he needed to know how that underlying content was being “condensed” or otherwise transformed. Then he could follow the dream upstream, so to speak, to the source. Vischer, in contrast, valued these transformations in their own right, as the basis for empathy, creativity, and love. Freud cared about how the process worked, Vischer about the beautiful forms it could create: “Every work of art reveals itself to us as a person harmoniously feeling himself intg a kindred object.” 

That is why Freud led to modern psychology and Vischer led to modern art. The psychology of the unconscious and abstract art, two groundbreaking ideas of the early twentieth century, were actually close cousins, with a common ancestor in philosopher Karl Albert Scherner, whom both Vischer and Freud credited as the source of their key idea. Vischer called Scherner’s 1861 book The Life of the Dream a “profound work, feverishly probing hidden depths . . . from which I de. rived the notion that I call ‘empathy’ or ‘feeling-into’”; in The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud cited Scherner at length, praising the “essential correctness” of his ideas and describing his book as “the most origina] and far-reaching attempt to explain dreaming as a special activity of the mind.” 

Vischer led to abstract art via Wilhelm Worringer (1881-1965), whose 1906 art history dissertation Adstraction and Empathy had an argument as simple as its title: empathy is only half the story. Worringer argued that Vischer-style empathy produces realistic art, the product of striving to correspond with the external world. An artist may feel at home in the world, feel-into things, put himself into them, and then find himself out there through his connection to them. Certain vigorous, confident cultures, in Worringer’s view, were particularly likely to produce such artists, such as classical Greece and Rome, or the Renaissance. 

Other individuals or cultures, though, find the world dangerous and frightening, and their deep psychic need is to find a place of refuge. Such an artist’s “most powerful urge,” Worringer wrote, is “to wrest the object of the external world out of its natural context” of chaos and confusion. These artists might depict a goat as a triangle with two curved lines for horns, ignoring its actual complex shape, or portray an ocean wave in the timeless geometry of a zigzag line, not by trying to copy the arbitrary details of its real appearance. This is the opposite of classic realism: abstraction. 

For Worringer, then, empathy had a “counter-pole” in the urge to abstraction; empathy was but “one pole of human artistic feeling,” no more valid or more aesthetic than the other. Some artists create by reaching out, feeling-into the world, and others by turning their backs, pulling away (the word abstraction is from Latin ab-trahere, to pull away). Different people have different needs, and their art must satisfy those needs, almost by definition—otherwise there would have been no reason to make it. 

While early twentieth-century artists saw Worringer’s ideas as important vindication, Carl Jung recognized the insight in Worringer’s psychological theory. In his first essay advancing a theory of psychological types, Jung cited Worringer as a “valuable parallel” to his own theory of introversion and extraversion: abstraction is introverted, turning away from the world; empathy is extraverted, entering into the world. But it would take Rorschach—an artist and psychiatrist studying the psychology of perception—to fully bring the strands together. 

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He made a hand-colored map showing that areas of sect activity corresponded with high concentrations of weavers, and speculated about why. Historically, he traced sect activity in these regions hack through carlier Protestant cults to the twelfth century Waldensiany and thirteenth-century Brethren of the Free Spirit, to still carlier heresies and separatist movements, all leaving clear traces in the region down to the present day. Psychologically, he argued along Jungian line, that schizophrenic delusions tap into the same psychic sources as ancient belict systems, and he noted similarities between the images and ideas of this entire history of sects to those of myths and philosophies reaching back to the ancient Gnostics. He showed, for instance, that the eighteenth-century Antonianers’ teachings matched, in detail, those of first-century Adamites. 

Sociologically, he argued that in founding a sect a charismatic leader was less important than a receptive group of followers—a community can manufacture a leader out of almost anyone, if the need is strong enough, and when sects were imported from elsewhere, they tended to die out quickly unless the community was already primed. He distinguished between active and passive followers, as well as between hysterical leaders, whose messages were determined by personal complexes, and the more powerful schizophrenic leaders, whose doctrines tapped deeply into archetypal mythologies. 

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Coursing through the Russian Silver Age were a number of themes close to Rorschach’s heart: synesthesia, madness, visual art as self. expression. Movement, the key element in the reflex hallucinations Rorschach had studied, was here seen as “the basic feature of reality,” in the words of modern novelist Andrei Bely; theorists of the Russian ballet called movement the most important aspect of all great art. 

Within psychology, the sectarian distinctions that seemed so important in far-off western Europe largely fell away. A 1909 advertising brochure for the Kryukovo proclaimed that patients would receive “hypnosis, suggestion, and psychoanalysis,” as well as “psychotherapy in its proper sense”—meaning so-called rational therapy, a technique pioneered by another Swiss, Paul Dubois, which for a time was more prominent and popular than Freud’s method (much as a similar approach, now called cognitive-behavioral therapy, is today). No battle lines were drawn between the different camps. 

And the inspiration for Russian psychiatry was Tolstoy, the wise, humanistic soul-healer who had inspired Rorschach too. One reason psychoanalysis was so well received in Russia was that it meshed with homegrown traditions of introspection, “purification of the soul,” existential reflections on the deep questions of human life, and respect for people’s inner worlds. If Rorschach’s mix of ideals and intellectual interests—generalist, nonsectarian, broadly humanist, literary, visualseemed idiosyncratic in a western European context, it was standard for Russian psychiatrists. 

Freud had joked in a 1912 letter to Jung that “there seems to be a local epidemic of psychoanalysis” in Russia, but it was not in fact a one-way relationship, an “epidemic” spreading from Europe to the hinterlands. Russians were prominent psychoanalysts in both Russia and the West. Osipov, Rorschach’s Kryukovo colleague, published the first journal of psychoanalysis anywhere and sat on the board of Freud’s journal. Even supposedly “European” ideas were not themselves unRussian. Freud called the psychic mechanism of repressing unacceptable psychological material “censorship,” an explicit allusion to Russian political censorship: in his definition, the “imperfect instrument of the Tsarist regime for preventing penetration of alien Western influences.”