RORSCHACH’S MONTHS AT the Kryukovo in early 1914 came at a watershed moment in Russian art, one that redefined the power of viewing images. Russian Futurism was in full force, and Rorschach witnessed firsthand. Probably in 1915, he drafted an essay called “The Psychology of Futurism,” whose journalistic opening set the scene nicely: “Futurism, as it presents itself today to an astonished world, appears at first to be a colorful jumble of incomprehensible images and sculptures, of high-sounding manifestos and inarticulate sounds, of noisy art and artistic noise, of a will to power and a will to illogicality. Only one common theme is distinct: An unbounded self-confidence and a perhaps even more boundless condemnation of everything that came before, a battle-cry against all of the concepts that until today have shaped the course of culture, art, and daily life.”
Futurism was a modernist pressure cooker in which everything seemed to be shattering or dissolving at once. An explosion of energy in literature, painting, theater, and music, its Russian version contained a swarm of submovements, cliques, and branding strategies, inchiding Cubo-Futurism, Ego-Futurism, Everythingism, Centrifuge, and the excellently named Mezzanine of Poetry. These were discussed in the press almost daily while Rorschach was in Russia, and in January and February 1914 the leading Italian Futurist, F. T. Marinetti, gave well publicized and well-attended lectures in Moscow. The movement took to the streets with parades in which artists would “walk with painted faces among the crowds, reciting futurist poetry.” When a little girl gave one parading poet an orange, he began to eat it. “He’s eating, he’s eating,” the astonished crowd whispered, as if the Futurists were Martians; a nationwide tour soon followed.
The Futurists’ explorations resonated with many of Rorschach’s interests. The composer and painter Mikhail Matyushin, a follower of Ernst Haeckel, studied chance forms of driftwood, wrote theories of color, and tried to expand human visual capacity, in part with exercises meant to regenerate lost optical nerves in the back of the head and the soles of the feet. Nikolai Kulbin, whom Rorschach heard lecture, was an artist and medical doctor who published books and scientific articles on sensory perception and psychological testing. He had this psychological slogan as his motto: “The self does not know anything except its own feelings, and while projecting these feelings it creates its own world.” Poet Aleksei Kruchenykh championed “seeing things on both sides” and “subjective objectivity”: “Let a book be small, but ... everything the writer’s own, to the last ink blot.” Futurists published synesthetic works such as Intuztive Colors and tables of correspondences between colors and musical notes; manifestos on how neologisms and mistakes “bring about movement and the new perception of the word”; a poem where the poet is in a movie theater and, making a special effort, begins to see the image upside down. These and other key figures are mentioned or quoted in Rorschach’s Futurism essay.
He acknowledged that Futurism seemed crazy and illogical but affirmed that “the time has now passed when any movement, any ac~ tion, can be dismissed as ‘crazy.’ . .. There is no such thing as absolute honsense. Even in the darkest and most elaborate delusions of our de~ mentia praecox patients, there exists a hidden meaning.” He drew the parallel between Futurism and schizophrenia in Zurich School terms, justifying the wider applicability of psychoanalytic theory: “Connections unimaginable until now have been forged with the elaboration of the depth psychology that Freud has pioneered. . . . Not only neurotic symptoms and delusional systems and dreams but also myths, fairy tales, poems, musical works, paintings—all have proved to be accessible to psychoanalytical research.” As a result, “Even if we decide to describe Futurism as madness and nonsense, we still have the obligation to find sense in that nonsense.”
Rorschach took Futurism seriously and found sense in it specific enough to criticize. In the most original analysis in his Futurism essay he argued that the Futurists misunderstood how images generate q feeling of movement. He pointed out that usually only cartoonists like his old favorite Wilhelm Busch, try to present motion by showing an object in multiple states at once, for instance by giving a vig. orous pianist numerous arms and hands. Michelangelo’s sculptures o, paintings, in contrast, are themselves dynamic—they make you feel the movement. The Futurists, with their dozen-legged dogs, made the mistake of trying an approach like Busch’s, but Rorschach was unusually firm: for an artist aspiring to more than cartoons, “there is no other way to handle motion” than Michelangelo’s way; “The only serious way to represent motion in an object is by influencing the kinesthetic sense of the beholder.” The Futurist strategy is “impossible” because it misunderstands the relationship between empathy—Vischer’s term hineinftiblen—and vision: “There is no need to consult the philosophers and psychologists, but simply the physiologists. Multiple legs next to each other do not awaken an idea of movement, or only in a very abstract way, just as a human being cannot empathize with a millipede along kinesthetic pathways.”
Visual images, at least if they’re good, produce mental states—they “awaken an idea” in the viewer. At one point in his essay draft, between X’s, Rorschach inserted without explanation a Russian quotation:
X
A picture—The rails on which the viewer’s imagination must roll, according to the artist’s representation.
xX
In Switzerland, Rorschach and Gehring had used inkblots to gauge the viewer's imagination, treating it as a measurable quantity. Here was 2 vision of pictures changing the viewer’s imagination—leading it, as of rails, in a new direction.
Regardless of his specific arguments, a psychiatrist writing about “the psychology of Futurism” in 1915, engaging with avant-garde art in ways entirely consistent with his psychiatric theory and practice, was ahead of his time. Freud would freely admit that he was a philistine about modern art; Jung would write one essay on Joyce and one on Picasso, both superficial and dismissive, and would be widely mocked, never going near the subject again. There were other psychiatrists more attentive to art, and artists who studied psychology, even outside of Russia—the German surrealist Max Ernst, for instance, had extensive university training in psychiatry. But Rorschach was a uniquely knowledgeable figure to straddle the disciplinary divide.
Beyond Futurism, western European and Russian ideas were coming together in the nineteen-tens to create abstract art. The figures usually credited as the first purely abstract modern artists are the Dutchman Piet Mondrian, the Russian Kazimir Malevich, the Russian émigré in Munich Wassily Kandinsky, and the Swiss Sophie Taeuber. Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy was a shared point of reference. Rorschach’s Futurism essay just predated the defining even, in the birth of modern art in Switzerland: the creation of Dadaism ing Zurich cabaret in February 1916. Sophie Taeuber took part, along with her future husband Hans (Jean) Arp; at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts, where Ulrich Rorschach had studied a generation before, Taeuber taught what Arp called “bevies of girls hastening to Zurich fromall the cantons of Switzerland, with the burning desire to neverendingly embroider floral wreaths on cushions,” and “managed to bring most of them to embrace the square.”
There is no record of any direct contact between Rorschach and the Dadaists, but he certainly followed developments in western European modern art. He had made a cartoon satirizing Expressionism in high school; he would later use the Austrian Expressionist artist Alfred Kubin to illustrate his theories about introversion and extraversion. More generally, he would bring his insights about art and psychology back from Russia to his psychiatric practice in Switzerland.
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The normal subject knows as well as the experimenter that the blot can have no claim to be anything but a blot, and that the requested answers can only depend on vague analogies and more or less imaginative ‘interpretations’ of the images.” A Rorschach blot, though, really might be two waiters pouring out pots of soup, with a bowtie in the middle. You can feel answers coming at you from the image. There’s something there. At the other extreme, Justinus Kerner’s klexography is unambiguous. He even added captions. Compared to his blots, Rorschach’s are suggestive—some more so, others less—and richly open to interpretation. They have unclear foreground/background relationships, potentially meaningful white spaces, questionable coherence so that a viewer has to integrate the image into a whole (or not); they can be seen as human or inhuman, animal or nonanimal, skeletal or nonskeletal, or. ganic or inorganic. They have a mystery about them as they strain at the edge of the intelligible.
While crafting the blots, Rorschach worked to eliminate any sign of craftsmanship and artistry. The blots had to not look “made” at all; their impersonality was crucial to how they worked. In his early drafts, it was still obvious where Rorschach had used a brush, how thick the brush was, and so on, but soon he had shapes that seemed to have made themselves. His images were clearly symmetrical, but too detailed to be mere folded smears. The colors added to the mystery: how did they get into an inkblot? Rorschach’s images increasingly looked unlike anything seen before, in life or art. After “spending a long time using images that were more complicated and structured, more pleasing and aesthetically refined,” he later wrote, “I dropped them” in the interest of producing better, more revealing results.
It was especially important that they not seem like a puzzle, a test, because Rorschach’s paranoid patients had hair-trigger reactions to any hint of ulterior motives. There couldn’t be names or numbers on an image, since patients would pay too much attention to what they might mean, ignoring the picture itself. The cards couldn’t have a border, because in Switzerland that was likely to remind a schizophrenic of a black-edged death notice. Rorschach knew from Miinsterlingen how to get around patients’ suspicions; a great advantage of the inkblot method, he realized early on, was that it could be “conducted either like a game or like an experiment, without affecting the results. Often, even unresponsive schizophrenics unwilling to undergo any other experiment will willingly perform this task.” It was fun! Rorschach did not originally conceive of the blots as a “test” at all: he called it an experiment, a nonjudgmental and open-ended investigation into people’s ways of seeing.
The choice to make the blots symmetrical might seem inevitable, but it was one of Rorschach’s crucial decisions or intuitions, with allimportant consequences. Earlier inkblots in psychology didn’t have to be symmetrical: Alfred Binet’s were merely “strange-shaped blots of ink on a white sheet of paper”; only two of Whipple’s fifteen blots were symmetrical, only two of Rybakov’s eight. But Rorschach’s blots were, and he laid out arguments for why: “The symmetry of the images has the disadvantage that people see disproportionately many butterflies etc., but the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Symmetry makes the form more pleasing to the eye and thus makes the subject more willing to perform the task. The image is equally suitable for right-handed and left-handed subjects. It also encourages the seeing of whole scenes.”
Rorschach could have chosen to use vertical symmetry across a horizontal center line, evoking a landscape with horizon or a reflective pool, or even symmetry across a diagonal. Instead he used horizontal or bilateral symmetry. Perhaps he remembered from Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature that this is what seems organic and natural, or recalled from Vischer’s essay on empathy that “horizontal symmetry always presents a better effect than vertical symmetry because of its analogy with our body.” Whether consciously or intuitively, he worked with the symmetry of everything we care about most: other people, their faces, ourselves. Bilateral symmetry creates images we react to emotionally psychologically.
Another pivotal choice was to use red. Like any painter, Rorschach knew that red and other warm colors come at the viewer while blue ang cool colors recede: in the inkblots, red would confront the test taker more aggressively than any other color, demanding that we react, oy suppress a reaction. Red appears brighter to the human eye than other colors at the same saturation—the Ielmholtz-Kohlrausch effect; it also looks more saturated than other colors at the same brightness. It interacts with the light/dark dichotomy better than any other color, looking dark in contrast to white, and light in contrast to black. (An. thropologists would discover in 1969 that some languages have only two color terms—for black and white—but that any language with a third term uses red: red is color as such.) Earlier inkblots in psychology had not used color at all, but Rorschach used the color with the most color, just as bilateral symmetry is the most meaningful kind of symmetry.
Rorschach’s most definitive break with his predecessors was to stop using inkblots to measure the imagination. When Rorschach read on the first page of Hens’s dissertation that seeing things in a formless that “the blot can have no claim to be anything but a blot” without “more or less imaginative inkblot “requires what we call ‘imagination, ‘interpretations’ of the images,” his whole life had prepared him to say: No. A blot is not just a blot, at least not if it’s any good. Pictures have real meaning. The image itself constrains how you see it—as on railsbut without taking away all your freedom: different people see differently, and the differences are revealing. Rorschach had learned that from his friends at the Zurich art museum, from all his efforts to read people as a doctor and as a human being.
The most obvious problem with measuring a subject’s imagination by counting answers—though it hadn’t been obvious to Hens, or to Alfred Binet and his successors—was that some answers are imaginative and others are not. An answer could be perceptive, seeing something really there in the image; it could be crazy, but that’s not the same as imaginative. Delusions seem real to the person who has them. No one looked at a blot and tried to see something that wasn’t there, Rorschach realized; they tried “to come up with an answer that gets as close to the truth of the picture as they can. This goes for the imaginative person exactly as much as for anyone else.” He found that whether or not he told a subject to “use your imagination” made no difference. A schizophrenic who was originally imaginative “would, of course, produce different, richer, more colorful delusions than a patient who was originally unimaginative,” but when a psychotic took his delusions for reality, this “probably {had} nothing whatsoever to do with the function of imagination.”
Two responses to his inkblots that Rorschach heard early on proved the point. In what would be Card VIII of the final test (see Color Plate 1), one thirty-six-year-old woman saw “A fairy-tale motif: a treasure in two blue treasure chests buried under the roots of a tree, with a fire underneath, and two mythical animals guarding it.” A man saw “Two bears, and the whole thing is round, so it’s the bear pit in Bern.”
The imaginative person had integrated the shapes and colors into a complete picture; her answer was playful, spoken with delight. The second answer, in contrast, was what Rorschach called “confabulation”: latching onto part of the image and overriding or disregarding the rest. The man saw the round shape as a bear pit not because bears were inside it—the bear shapes are actually around the edge of the card—but because his thoughts had gotten stuck on bears and everything now had to be about bears. He could no longer see the round shape in context, or connect it to anything else in the picture. (A more recent example of confabulation is seeing Card V {see page 145] as “Barack Obama with George Bush on his back” because “It’s a clash of two forces, and the whole picture may look like an eagle, the eagle being the symbol of the country.” The symbolism of the eagle doesn’t actually mean eagle parts look like presidents.) Rorschach described the tone of a confabulated answer as one not of creative play but of conquering a problem, and its logic is strangely literalistic, despite not really making sense. The woman’s fairy-tale associations were literary and creative, her answer imaginative, but at the same time her perception was much more coherent and clearly grounded in the image than the confabulator’s.
In short, one more thing found in a blot should not simply count as one more point on a person’s imagination score. What mattered was how people saw what they saw—how they took in visual information, and how they understood it, interpreted it, felt about it. What they could do with it. How it set them dreaming. In his dissertation, Rorschach had concentrated on the mechanics of perception in a relatively narrow physiological sense, exploring crossovers between pathways of seeing or hearing and bodily sensation. But perception included much more, all the way to interpreting what was perceived. Interpretations of chance images are a kind of perception—the italics are Rorschach’s.
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As HE WAS designing and creating the inkblots, Rorschach also had to figure out what he was designing his experiment to do. He wanted to study perception in the widest sense, but what did that mean he should ask people? And what should he pay attention to in their answers?
In keeping with his emphasis on perception over imagination, he asked people not what they found, or imagined, or could see, but what they did see. His question was: “What is this?” or “What might this be?” With images as suggestive as his, there were things that they actu. ally might be.
People’s answers started to reveal more than Rorschach had thought possible: higher or lower intelligence, character and personal ity, thought disorders and other psychological problems. The inkblots let him distinguish between certain kinds of mental illness that were hard to differentiate in other ways. What had started as an experiment looked to be, in fact, a test.
He would always insist he had invented the test “empirically,” simply stumbling upon the fact that different kinds of patients, and nonpatients with different kinds of personality, tended to respond in certain ways. Of course he couldn’t discover what a given type of response meant until he had started to notice it as distinctive in the first place. Once he got going, he must have suspected in advance at least some of the cot nections he would go on to find. But his talent was to notice a pattem, then pay attention to it, consider borderline cases, perhaps make new blots to bring out its distinguishing features, then try it all again.
The full-fledged test came to life in a matter of months. There aré no surviving notes or dated drafts, no letters from Rorschach to anyoné between early 1917 and summer 1918, so it will never be known exactly what the intermediate stages were. In his first surviving letter from 1918, on August 5, Rorschach told a colleague that he'd had “an experiment with ‘klexography’ in hand for a long time now... . Bleuler knows about it.” That same month, he wrote up the experiment, describing the final ten inkblots in their final sequence with the testing process and basic scheme of interpreting results in place. This essay, which he hoped to publish in a journal, was twenty-six typewritten pages long, plus twenty-eight sample test results. Ile would later expand on this framework but would never change it.
Rorschach had decided that there were four important aspects of people’s responses. First, he noted the total number of answers given in the test as a whole and whether the subject “rejected” any cards, refusing to answer at all. These were rough measures. He found that normal subjects never rejected cards—“At most neurotics blocked by specific complexes will reject one.” The number of answers could imply a basic ability or inability to perform the task, or could suggest mania (lots of answers) or depression (few), but it revealed little about how a person was seeing the cards.
Second, Rorschach noted down for each response whether it described the whole inkblot or homed in on a part. Calling Card V a bat was a Whole response (W); seeing bears on either side of Card VIII, or a woman raising her arms in the central part of Card I, was a Detail response (D). Seeing something in a tiny detail almost never noticed or interpreted, such as saying that the outermost top corners on Card I were apples, was different: a Small Detail response (Dd). The rare but telling case of interpreting the white space on a card got its own code. Rorschach paid attention to rhythms of W, D, and Dd as the subject’s characteristic approach or “way of grasping things”: whether they tended to move from whole to part, from part to whole, or get stuck in one or the other.
Third, Rorschach categorized each answer according to what formal property of the image it was based on. Most answers, naturally, were based on shapes: seeing a bat in a blot that’s bat-shaped, a bear in a part of a blot that’s bear-shaped. He called these Form responses (F).
Other answers were about the color: a blue square seen as a forgetme-not, ared shape as alpenglow. To call a blue area “the sky” would be a color response, even without explicitly saying “the blue sky,” becaus such an answer was based on the color in the blot, not the shape. Such pure Color responses (C), with the shape playing no role at all, were rare among normal test takers. Still more abnormal was to detach color from form altogether, saying about a red patch, “That's red.” More common were Color-Form responses (CF), based primarily on color but taki the shape into account somewhat (a gray blot as “@ rock,” even if the shape was not especially bouldery, or a splash of red as “blood”), or Form-Coloy responses (FC), mainly based on shape but with color playing a second ary role (“a purple spider,” ox “a blue flag” for a blue rectangular shape),
Answers that described shapes moving in the cards, such as “bear, dancing” instead of just bears, or “two elephants kissing,” or “two wait. ers bowing to each other,” were Movement responses (M). This was the least obvious of Rorschach’s categories—why should it make a differ. ence whether the bears were dancing or not? But Rorschach’s dissertation had been all about the interplay between seeing and feeling the movement in the world. His specialty as an artist was in perceiving and capturing movement, from his hinged shadow-puppets to his sketches of gestures in patient files. In the 1918 version of the test, Rorschach wrote that he usually saw people move or start to move when they gave a Movement response, for instance bending forward slightly as they saw the two waiters bowing. At this stage, he thought of the Movement response as essentially a reflex hallucination.
Almost every response to an inkblot was based on Form, Color, and/or Movement, although Rorschach did occasionally encounter an abstract answer that was none of the above, such as “I see an evil force.”
Finally, Rorschach paid attention to the content of the answerswhat people saw in the cards. “Anything you can imagine, of course,” as Rorschach put it, “and, with schizophrenics, quite a lot you can't.’
He was as fascinated and delighted as anyone else by the unexpected, creative, sometimes bizarre answers given by both patients and nonpatient test takers. But what he mainly focused on was whether an answer was “Good” or “Poor”—whether it could reasonably be said to describe the actual shape in the blot. He paid attention to what people saw primarily as a way of evaluating bow well they saw. A Form response would be marked as F+ for a well-seen form, Ffor the opposite, F for the unexceptionable.
And right at the start, in his August 1918 manuscript, this raised a question that would continue to dog the Rorschach: Who decides what's reasonable? “Of course there need to be many tests of normal subjects with various kinds of intelligence, in order to avoid any personal arbitrariness in judging whether an F answer is good or bad. One will then have to classify many answers as objectively good that one would not subjectively call good.” Having just invented the test, Rorschach had no data that would let him objectively distinguish between good and bad—no set of norms. Establishing a quantitative baseline for which answers were common among normal test takers and which were unusual or unique would be one of his first goals, because someone’s percentage of well-seen or badly seen forms (F+% and F—%) was a crucial measure of their cognitive functioning.
There were only a few content categories that Rorschach found significant in their own right, such as seeing Human figures, Animals, or Anatomy (noted down as H, A, Anat.). It mattered if a person got stuck on a certain kind of answer or had a wide range. In general, though, the content was secondary. Rorschach paid attention mostly to the formal aspects of the blots that produced the response: Detail and Whole; Movement, Color, and Form.
The written record of a subject’s Rorschach test, known as a “protocol,” listed every answer the person gave and assigned it codes. As answers to Card VIII, for example, “Two polar bears” would be coded as a well-seen Animal Form response about a commonly interpreted Detail, namely the red figures on the side, with the color irrelevant (D F+ A). “The flames of Purgatory and two devils coming out” would be a Movement response about a Detail (DM). “A carpet” would be the Whole as a poorly seen Form, since the blot doesn’t really look like a carpet (WF-). “The resurrection of the colossal coloric red and brownish and blue bead vein tumors,” an answer Rorschach heard from one overexcited forty-year-old schizophrenic patient at Herisau suffering from serious unsystematic delusions, was a Whole Color response (WC), with, needless to say, other issues.
After coding the answers, Rorschach would calculate a few basic scores, such as how many F's, C’s, and M’s there were, the percentage of poor answers (F%), the percentage of animal answers (A%). That’s it, The test results were these dozen or so letters and numbers.
In his 1918 essay outlining the test, Rorschach described typical results for dozens of different subvarictics of mental illness, always careful to state when he lacked a sufficient number of cases in Herisau to generalize safely. 1Ic insisted that these typical profiles, while they might seem arbitrary, had emerged in practice. A manic-depressive in a depressive phase, he wrote, will give no Movement responses or Color responses, will see no Human figures, and will tend to start with Smal] Details before moving to the Whole (the reverse of the normal pattern), giving few Whole responses overall. People with schizophrenic depression, on the other hand, will reject more cards, will occasionally give Color answers, will very often give Movement answers, and will see a much smaller percentage of Animals and significantly more poor forms (F—% = 30-40). Why? Rorschach refused to speculate, but pointed out that this differential diagnosis—being able to tell the difference between manic-depressive and schizophrenic depression, “in most cases with certainty”—was a real medical breakthrough.
Especially with findings of psychosis, the test results could be compelling enough to override what he had before his eyes. W hen someone with no psychotic symptoms produced typically psychotic results, Rorschach dug deeper and often found they had psychotic heredity, had sufferers in the immediate family, or had recently shown symptoms. Sometimes they had been in remission for years. Even if not, he might diagnose latent schizophrenia. Rorschach thought in general that the inkblots revealed quality, not quantity—the kind of psychology a person had, not the degree to which these tendencies were expressed. The test could detect a schizophrenic disposition irrespective of whether symptoms were strong, weak, or even nonexistent. Before long, he was grappling with the ethical issue of how to tell a subject that his or her test showed latent schizophrenia or psychosis—an invisible mental illness, perhaps totally unsuspected. But the payoff was worth it: “Maybe we'll soon reach the point where we can judge whether latent schizophrenia exists or not in every case. Just think how much of the fear of insanity that embitters people’s lives we'll be able to free the world from if that happens!”
At no point did Rorschach try to use a single response to impose a psychological profile. He found, for example, that certain kinds of answers were given almost exclusively by either schizophrenics or people talented at drawing, but he was not tempted to conclude that drafts. manship must be correlated with, or similar to, the illness. “Naturally? he wrote, answers that seem similar “will be qualitatively very differ. ent” when coming from different kinds of people.
From the beginning, the inkblot experiment was multidimensional. it called upon, and thus tested, many different abilities and capacities at the same time, This meant, reassuringly, that the test was largely sclf correcting. Rorschach found that if you retested a schizophrenic over time, there would be “very different interpretations of the cards but the F%, the number of Movement, Form, and Color responses W and Dd, and so on, would remain more or less the same—assuming of course that the paticnt’s condition has not significantly changed” With ten cards, and room for multiple answers on each card, an ey. pecially creative or bizarre answer or two was unlikely to change the overall record. One mustachioed ballet-dancing snake on the moon didn’t mean you were crazy.
The scores worked together to give a picture of the subject’s psychology. A lot of unusual or bizarre answers (F-) might be a sign of high intelligence and great creativity or might imply serious defects and an inability to see what everyone else sees. But the test as a whole could distinguish between the two. The first kind of person would tend to have a high number of Whole responses, Movement responses, and well-seen forms (W, M, F+), the second kind of person a low number of all three.
Similarly, Whole responses could be a good sign or a bad sign. Rorschach found one “intelligent highly educated man in a good mood” who pulled off a creative integration of every inkblot: a protocol of all well-seen Whole answers (W F+), twelve in total. Card II was “dancing squirrels on a tree stump,” Card VIII “a fantastic chandelier.” That meant something very different from the all-Whole protocol of another test taker, a twenty-five-year-old apathetic disorganized schizophrenic who gave one response per card, most of them F(Butterfly. Butterfly. Carpet. Animal carpet. Same thing. Carpet . ..).
Such interactions between different kinds of response were why administering the test was not easy. There was never any simple decodef for what a given answer meant. Worse still, Rorschach could offer 00 explanation for why the test worked at all. He had derived his correlations as empirically or instinctively as he had made his inkblots, building on no preexisting theory of what Movement and Color meant, or why to pay attention to them in the first place. His interpretations of any single protocol were holistic and often seemed idiosyncratic. All of this was either the test’s weakness or its strength: what made it subjective and arbitrary, or rich and multifaceted.
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His OWN INIMITABLE interpretations, along with the ham-fisted efforts by followers such as Behn-Eschenburg and Roemer, must have made Rorschach wonder if anyone else would be able to use the inkblots properly. At the same time, a major new work by Carl Jung left him no choice but to confront head-on how his own vision could be generalized to a universally applicable test—or not.
Jung's Psychological Types, published in 1921 a month before Psychodtagnostics, posited two basic human attitudes, introversion and extraversion. Jung added four main psychological functions: judging the world through thinking versus feeling, and perceiving the world through sensation versus intuition. These categories may sound familiar—Jung’s approach would later be popularized as the Myers-Briggs test. Questions of how we judge and perceive the world were also, obviously, central to the inkblot experiment. But the significance of Jung’s Psychological Types for Rorschach ran deeper than that.
Jung had been writing about introversion and extraversion since 1911, and while Rorschach had adopted and modified the terms for the inkblot test, Jung’s ideas had been changing too. After reading Psychological Types, Rorschach complained that “Jung is now on his fourth verSion of introversion—any time he writes anything, the concept changes again!” In the end, their definitions converged, and Rorschach’s state. ment in Psychodiagnostics that his concept of introversion had “hardly anything in common with Jung’s except the name” was misleading, be. cause it referred only to the versions of Jung’s theory published before 1920, when Rorschach was writing his book.
Like Rorschach, Jung rejected static pigeonholing and insisted that real people are always a mix of types. Jung described how parts of the self compensated for other parts—consciously introverted or thinking types, for instance, would have an unconscious marked by extraversion or feeling. In long, insightful descriptions of real-world interactions, he showed how people of one type behave in ways that are interpreted or misinterpreted by others through the lens of their own types. Jung's categories were not meant to label behavior but to help understand the complexity of real human situations.
The bottom line, though, was that people are different. When Jung was asked why he had said there were four types, precisely these four, each in extraverted or introverted form, he said that the schema was the result of many years of personal, psychiatric experience: that’s just the way people are.
The problem, Jung wrote in the epilogue to Psychological Types, was that any theory of the mind “presupposes a uniform human psychology, just as scientific theories in general presuppose that nature is fundamentally one and the same.” Unfortunately, it’s just not true: there #s no uniform human psychology. After referring to “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” and alluding to socialism and the Communist Revolution in Russia—allusions that certainly attracted Rorschach’s notice—Jung raised the decisive objection that equal opportunity for all, equal liberty, equal income, even total justice of every kind would make some people happy and other people unhappy. If I ran the world, should I give Mr. X twice as much money as Mr. Y, since money means so much more to him? Or not, since the principle of equality matters to Mr. Z? What about people who need to put other people down to feel good about themselves—how should their needs be satisfied? Nothing We legislate “will ever be able to overcome the psychological differences between men.” So too in science, and in any difference of opinion: “The Partisans of either side attack each other purely externally, always seeking out the chinks in their opponent's armor. Squabbles of this kind are usually fruitless. It would be of considerably greater value if the dispute were transferred to the psychological realm, from which it arose in the first place. The shift of position would soon show a diversity of psychojogical attitudes, each with its own right to existence.” I'very worldview “depends on a personal psychological premise.” No theorist “realizes that the psychology he sees is 4is psychology, and on top of that is the psychology of his type. He therefore supposes that there can be only one true explanation . . . namely the one that agrees with his type. All other views—I might almost say all seven other views—which, in their way, are just as true as his, are for him mere aberrations” for which he feels “a lively but very understandable distaste.”
The project of Psychological Types had started with a case of incompatible views: while Freud thought everything was ultimately about sex, and Alfred Adler thought everything was ultimately about power, Jung’s work “sprang originally from my need to define the ways in which my outlook differed from Freud’s and Adler’s. ... In attempting to answer this question, I came across the problem of types; for it is one’s psychological type which from the outset determines and limits a person’s judgment.” In the book, Jung managed a delicate dance around his own limitations. Even as his whole project implied a kind of Olympian insight into all the different types, he again and again admitted his own partiality. He said outright that the desire for a total, overarching theory was a fact of his own psychology; that Freud was as right, in his way, as Jung was in his; that it had taken Jung years to recognize the existence and value of types other than his own; that his discussion of types unlike his own was inadequate.
As Jung knew perfectly well, seeing through another person’s eyes is all but impossible. “It is a fact constantly and overwhelmingly apparent in my practical work,” he wrote—a fact since confirmed by every comment section on the internet, one might add—“that people are Virtually incapable of understanding and accepting any point of view other than their own. ... Every man is so imprisoned in his type that he is simply incapable of fully understanding another standpoint.” The greatness of Psychological Types results from Jung’s intuitive and analyti~ cal power combined with his decades-long effort to get outside of himself, despite everything.
Rorschach recognized the fundamental stakes of the book, and it brought him up short the way nothing else had. With his Jungian background, Rorschach was naturally asked to review the work, and in April 1921 he agreed. But the more he studied it, the less sure he wag about how to incorporate its insights.
Admittedly, the book is a monster, with literally hundreds of pages on Indian Vedas, Swiss epic poetry, medieval Scholasticism, Goethe and Schiller, and whatever else could be shown to express the two poles of human experience. “I am reading Jung with mixed feelings,” Ror. schach wrote in June: “There is a lot that is right, definitely a lot, but embedded in a very queer architecture.” Five months later:
I am now reading Jung’s Types for the third time and I still can’t bring myself to start the review I am supposed to write... . In any case, I need to significantly rectify my earlier judgment about him. There really is an amazing amount in the book, and... for now I see no way to fault the deductive structure he lays out in contrast to Freud’s thought. . . . ’m gnawing at the book, but as soon as I start to put something together, I become suspicious of my own ideas.
One of his complaints about isolation in Herisau was that “I really want to have a long conversation with someone about Jung at some point. The book has very many good things, and it is damned hard to say where the speculation goes off track.” In January 1922, he was still struggling: “I have to agree with Jung, who distinguishes conscious and unconscious attitudes and says that when the conscious is extraverted, the unconscious is compensatorily introverted. This terminology is of course hideous, these formulations brutally smashed together, but clearly the idea of compensation is very significant.” If nothing else, Jung had already argued for what Rorschach had thought was his own contrasting position: “Most cases have both introversive and extratensive aspects, every type is actually a mixture of the two.”
Psychological Types was forcing Rorschach to rethink his ideas—and his own psychology. “I thought at first that Jung’s types were purely speculative constructions,” Rorschach confided to his former patient, Pastor Burri. “But when I finally tried to derive Jungian types from the results of my own experiment, I saw that it was possible. This meant that, in resisting Jung, my own type had actually prejudiced me much more than I thought.”
In recognizing that his reactions revealed something about himself, Rorschach not only got to the heart of Jung’s theory but also built on his own previous insights. In his dissertation, he had acknowledged that “my account of reflex-hallucinatory processes may seem subjective to some readers, for example auditory types, since it is written by someone who is primarily a motor type, secondarily a visual type.” In his diary, on January 28, 1920: “Again and again we run into the fact that introverts cannot understand how extraverts think and behave, and vice versa. And they don’t even realize that they are dealing with a different kind of person.” Now Jung had brought the problem to a head. If ideas came from a theorist’s personal psychology, then was any universal theory possible?
Jung had divided the world into eight distinct worldviews, but Rorschach’s framework risked an even more thoroughgoing relativism, shattering a unitary truth into a nearly endless variety of perceptual styles. Until Psychological Types, Rorschach had been able to use his own balance of different qualities to paper over the troubling implications of his inkblot experiment. A brilliant intuitive reader of test protocols, he also tried to put the results on a solid numerical basis. He had written that an examiner too inclined or too disinclined to Movement responses would have a hard time scoring tests properly—but he saw himself as able to strike the right balance. He always refused to call either Movement or Color types better or worse. Jung’s book confronted him with his own partiality, even the partiality of evenhandedness.
In his dissertation, Rorschach had had to admit that the psychology he described was his psychology; later, he thought that his inkblots had given him access to anyone and everyone’s way of seeing. But truly accepting that everyone was different would make it harder to claim that he could bridge those differences anyway.
Waite Rorschach was struggling with Jung, and with his neurotic patients, his ideas continued to develop, touching on many of the ways the test would evolve in the century to come. He moved away from Experience Type and the introvert/extravert balance as the main find. ing of the test. He started paying closer attention to the subject’s way of talking, frantic and compulsive or calm and relaxed. He raised ques. tions that would define a century of debates: whether the examiner influenced the results; whether the test found permanent personality traits or reflected the test taker’s situation and passing mood; whether standardization made the test more reliable or merely more rigid; whether responses should be scored in isolation or seen in the context of the whole protocol. “My method is still in its infancy,” he wrote on March 22, 1922. “I am completely convinced that, after enough experience with the main inkblot series, ways forward to other, more specialized inkblots will open up, which will necessarily allow for significantly more differentiated conclusions.”
His approach remained cautious. Examiners, he wrote, seemed able to influence the content of responses much more than formal aspects of the protocol, “but of course systematic study of this is very necessary.” Even in a holistic approach, obtaining quantifiable data was essential: “A general view of the total findings must be retained to avoid being tripped up by the score for a particular variable, but even after a great deal of experience and practice, I consider it quite impossible to obtain a definite and reliable interpretation without doing the calculations.” As for being free to interpret results at will or tied down to more or less crude formulas, “a dilemma that comes up unfortunately quite often in the test,” Rorschach took the side of scientific objectivity: “All my work has shown me that crude systematization is better than arbitrary interpretation, if the situation is not clear in and of itself.”
New discoveries continued to surprise him. When the latest volunteer assistant at Herisau started giving the inkblot test to patients at the Deaf-Mute Clinic in St. Gallen, Rorschach expected the deafmutes to have many kinesthetic responses, but “that turned out to be entirely false: they are purely visual Small Detail (Dd) interpreters with almost no M responses!” In retrospect, it was “a finding that is very understandable, however unexpected.” He concluded from this and similar findings that it was far too soon to try to construct a theory to explain the inkblot test: only after much experience with a fuller range of subjects would the right theory “fall into place on its own.”
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Within barely a dozen years of its arrival in America, the Rorschach was being taught, used, and studied furiously across the country. Scores were being refined and redefined, data collected and analyzed, techniques improved and invented, results analyzed blind and correlated with other tests and every sociocultural factor imaginable. Along with asking what about the test made it so popular, it makes sense to ask what made the country so receptive. America was in another “testhungry time,” as Rorschach had written of Switzerland in 1921, but there was more. Americans increasingly thought of themselves as having something special inside that could not be accessed with any standard tests, and the Rorschach would prove uniquely able to grasp it.
WHAT YOU DO—IN FACT, EVERYTHING YOU DO—EXPRESSES who you are. Your actions reveal not so much the content of your character as your personality: not conformity to recognized moral virtues, but how you stand out by being unique and special.
These familiar ideas were the product of a shift in early twentiethcentury America from a culture of character to a culture of personality. “Character,” an ideal of serving a higher moral and social order, was regularly invoked around the turn of the twentieth century alongside citizenship, duty, democracy, work, building, golden deeds, outdoor life, conquest, honor, reputation, morals, manners, integrity, and above all manhood. “Personality,” in contrast, was invoked in the following decades together with words like fascinating, stunning, attractive, magnetic, glowing, masterful, creative, dominant, forceful—not nouns but adjectives, not specific kinds of behavior but hype for making an impact.
These new terms of praise were amoral: someone’s character was good or bad, but a personality was appealing or unappealing. If anything, bad was better—a thrilling rebel beat an upstanding drip any day. The charm and charisma that compelled people to like you came to be seen as mattering more than integrity or honorable deeds that might earn their respect; poise took precedence over virtue, seeming Sincere over being sincere. Who cared what you were like on the inside if you were too dull to be noticed in the faceless crowd at all?
The cultural shift from character to personality can be tracked in self-help books, sermons, education, advertising, politics, fictionanything that offered an ideal of how to live. Dr. Orison Swett Marden, the Dr. Phil of his day, ended his 1899 book Character: The Greatest Thing in the World with a quote from US president James Garfield: “I must succeed in making myself a man.” By 1921, when he came to write Masterful Personality, Marden had changed with the times: “Ou success in life depends upon what others think of us.” Movie stars were part of the same shift: studios at first tended to conceal the identities of actors and actresses, but around 1910 the star was born, and his or her personality became the movie’s main selling point. Douglas Fairbanks, the first such movie celebrity, was described this way in 1907; “He’s not good looking. But he has worlds of personality.” Or this slogan from one of cinema’s greatest, Katharine Hepburn: “Show me an actress who isn’t a personality and you'll show me a woman who isn't a star.” The archetype of the jazzy new age wasn’t Gatsby the Good Person, but Gatsby the incomparably Great, and how he made his money mattered infinitely less than his indescribable qualities, his sparkle, his beautiful shirts.
Since you have some control over how you come across, you can shape your destiny by improving your self-presentation—the classic American promise took on this form in the early twentieth century, echoed endlessly by style magazines and business gurus in the decades since. The downside of endless opportunities to make a masterful impression, of course, was the infinite risk of making a bad one. In a world of constant social monitoring and comparison, the demands of selfmarketing never stopped: absolutely anything might reveal to watchful, judging eyes more about you than you might even know.
One classic study, Roland Marchand’s Advertising the American Dream, reprints a truly terrifying array of early-twentieth-century ads proclaiming that your bad breath, careless shave, unfortunate clothes, or droopy socks would be noticed, dooming your chances at romance, success, and a decent life. “CRITICAL EYES ARE SIZING YOU UP RIGHT NOw,” intoned the voice of Williams shaving cream. Only because she owned a Dr. West toothbrush could one woman pass “The Smile Test” when she fell off a toboggan and a handsome stranger helped her to her feet. Ads of an earlier generation had tended to actually describe their products rather than offering this combination of promise and threat.
But even if the new ads exaggerated a little, they reflected social realities. Superficial things “were more significant in a mobile, urban, impersonal society” than in an earlier era of more stable relationships, in Marchand’s words. Especially in love and business, to have a masterful personality meant you had to “be yourself,” but that also meant smiling the right smile and wearing the right sock garters. Without such external markers, you were out of luck.
Given the high stakes, the glamour and flair of “personality” paradoxically came to be essential: style was substance, how you came across was who you were. “As late as 1915,” in the words of one leading anthropologist, “the very word still carried overtones chiefly of piquancy, unpredictability, intellectual daring: a man’s personality was much like a woman’s ‘it’”—the sex appeal that made her, in the cliché of the time, an “It Girl.” By the 1930s, though, once Freud had come to prominence, Americans had seized upon the idea that some ineffable inner force dominated our lives, and they equated that force with personality. Jung’s “psychological types,” which had described something more like character than style, were reimagined in America as “personality types,” starting with the work of Myers and Briggs in the 1920s. And while the seething energy of the Freudian unconscious was hopelessly chaotic, personality was understood as having a “structure,” something that could be analyzed, categorized, grappled with. If you described that inner force as “personality,” there was more you could say about it.
This evolving sense of self was what the Rorschach test tapped into, and it in turn redefined the test. A 1939 essay called “Projective Methods for the Study of Personality,” by Lawrence Frank, was nothing less than a new vision of the individual’s place in the world, redefining psychology for the twentieth century and putting the Rorschach, as a test of “personality,” right at the center of it.
In a 1939 essay, Frank explained personality in the broadest possible terms, as the way we give meaning to life. “The personality process,” he wrote, “might be regarded as a sort of rubber stamp which the individual imposes upon every situation.” The person “necessarily ignores or subordinates many aspects of the situation that for him are irrelevant and meaningless and selectively reacts to those aspects that are personally significant.” We shape our world, which means we are not passive creatures, receiving and responding to stimuli or facts in the outside world. In Frank’s view, there are no facts, no outside world, no external stimuli at all except insofar as a person “selectively constitutes them and responds to them.” It was an idea with shades of Nikolai Kulbin, the Futurist whom Rorschach had heard in Russia: “The self does not know anything except its own feelings, and while projecting these feelings it creates its own world.”
Such subjectivity posed a problem for the scientist. There was nothing replicable, no control experiments, only the unique interaction that takes place whenever “a person perceives, and imputes to what he perceives, the meaning which he himself projects upon whatever he perceives, then responds in some manner.” Everything a person did was significant, but it needed to be interpreted, not simply tabulated. Standardized tests wouldn’t work. The scientist needed a way to measure how a subject’s personality organized his or her experience.
Lawrence Frank had a solution, and a new name for it: “projective methods.” To Frank these were not “tests,” though they were sometimes referred to as such. Instead, projective methods presented a person with something open-ended, something that meant “not what the experimenter has arbitrarily decided it should mean (as in most psychological experiments using standardized stimuli in order to be ‘objective’), but rather whatever it must mean to the personality who gives it, or imposes upon it, his private, idiosyncratic meaning and organization.” Subjects would then react in a way that expressed their personality. Rather than giving an “objectively” right or wrong answer, a subject would “project” his or her personality out into the world for the experimenter to see.
Frank’s ultimate projective method was the Rorschach.
