How Dr. Rorschach blotted his way into history

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 [working at a clinic in the Swiss town of ] Münsterlingen 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 all-important 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 [U.S. intelligenc testing pioneer G.M.] Whipple’s 15 blots were symmetrical, only two of [Russian psychologist Fyodor] 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 centre 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 [Ernst] Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature that this is what seems organic and natural, or recalled from [Robert] 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 colours come at the viewer while blue and cool colours recede: in the inkblots, red would confront the test taker more aggressively than any other colour, demanding that we react, or suppress a reaction. Red appears brighter to the human eye than other colours at the same saturation — the Helmholtz-Kohlrausch effect; it also looks more saturated than other colours at the same brightness.

It interacts with the light/dark dichotomy better than any other colour, looking dark in contrast to white, and light in contrast to black. (Anthropologists would discover in 1969 that some languages have only two colour terms — for black and white — but that any language with a third term uses red: red is colour as such.)

Earlier inkblots in psychology had not used colour at all, but Rorschach used the colour with the most colour, 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 (Polish med student Szymon) Hens’s dissertation that seeing things in a formless inkblot “requires what we call ‘imagination,’ ” that “the blot can have no claim to be anything but a blot” without “more or less imaginative ‘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 rails — but 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 colourful 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, one 36-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 colous 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 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.

Excerpted from The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing by Damion Searls. Copyright © 2017 Damion Searls. Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.