Sensations could also change in kind, not just in location. A pinch in the calf could be felt as a pain in the tooth, but a purely visual experience—B.G. seeing floaters or H.R. watching an autopsy—could turn into a nonvisual bodily sensation. Rorschach had a long history of looking at paintings and paying attention to what he felt, and as an artist he had experienced the reverse: bodily sensations turning back into visual perceptions. “If I try to call up in my mind a given image,” he wrote, “my visual memory is often unable to do it, but if I have ever drawn the object and I remember one single stroke of the pen from the drawing, even the tiniest line, the memory image I am looking for appears at once.”
Rorschach’s body could activate his vision: “When, for example, I am unable to call up Schwind’s painting Falkenstein’s Ride as a memory image but I know how the knight is holding his right arm (‘knowing’ here as a nonperceptual mental image), I can voluntarily copy the position of this arm, in my imagination or in reality, and this immediately gives me a visual memory of the picture that is much better than without this aid.” This was, he reiterated, precisely the same as what happened in his schizophrenic patients: by holding his arm the right way, he had “hallucinatorily called forth, so to speak, the perceptual components of the visual image.”
What Freud had described in dreams actually took place across all of our perceptions, awake or asleep, sane or insane. In Freud’s theory, the bizarre images in dreams are “condensed” or combined together out of various experiences. Someone in a dream can look like my boss, remind me of my mother, talk like my lover, and say something I overheard a stranger say at a café while I was talking to a friend, and the dream is about all these relationships at once. Rorschach realized that our bodies do the same as our dreaming minds: blend things together, the calf and the tooth, the arm and the memory of the painting, the man on the lawn and the slash in the neck. “Just as the psyche can separate, combine, and condense various visual elements under certain circumstances (primarily under the influence of unconscious desires),” Rorschach wrote, “it must be able to similarly redefine other sense perceptions under the same circumstances.” Sensations “can be ‘condensed’ in the same way as visual perceptions are condensed in dreams.”
Faced with a patient such as B.G., Rorschach was drawn not so much to decipher her “secret story,” as Jung would have put it, as to share her way of seeing and feeling. What made these unreal sensations possible, 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.
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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 read our emotions into” these inhuman forms. Not just our emotions, our very selves: “We have the wonderful ability to project and incorporate 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 of philosophers, psychologists, and aesthetic theorists. To describe his radical new concept, he used the German word Einfühlung, 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 a boxer’s punches like “fingers tapping” on a windowpane. Or those famous moments of imaginative attention and empathy. “If a Sparrow 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 Hermann’s 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 on a 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 into 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 derived 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 original 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 Abstraction 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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Rorschach could practice medicine in Münsterlingen, but he needed to write a dissertation to receive his MD. Students were usually assigned dissertation topics by their professors, but when the time came, Rorschach proposed five ideas of his own to his adviser, Bleuler.
The mix was typical of his Zurich School background: heredity, criminology, psychoanalysis, literature. He thought he might study whether a predisposition to psychosis could be traced through a patient’s family history, using archival material in Münsterlingen or his hometown of Arbon; he proposed a psychoanalytical study of a teacher accused of offenses against morality, and another of a catatonic patient who heard voices. He was interested in working on Dostoyevsky and epilepsy but hoped to pursue the topic more thoroughly in Moscow. In the end, he chose his most original idea, telling Bleuler he “would be very pleased if something could come of it.”
Rorschach’s dissertation, which he finished in 1912, set out to define the physiological pathways that make empathy in Vischer’s sense possible. “On ‘Reflex Hallucinations’ and Related Phenomena” may be a brain-numbing title in English, but the subject was nothing less than the connection between what we see and how we feel.
Reflexhalluzination was a technical psychiatric term invented in the 1860s for precisely the class of phenomena that Rorschach found fascinating in his patients and himself, along with synesthesia, Proustian memories unlocked by certain smells, and any other instance of involuntary perception induced by a stimulus. John Keats feeling himself pick about the gravel when he looked at a sparrow was a reflex hallucination, if you want to put it that way, although “cross-sensory perception” or “induced hallucination” might be a more vivid translation.
After opening his dissertation with the mandatory dry review of the literature, Rorschach presented forty-three vivid, numbered examples of crossovers between vision and hearing, between seeing or hearing and bodily sensations, and between other pairs of senses, starting with the dream of his sliced brain as Example 1. He quickly dismissed the simple associations that happen all the time (when you hear your cat meow, you picture him in your mind), much as Vischer had dismissed associations. While reflex hallucinations did involve associations—Rorschach acknowledged that there was a reason B.G. felt the workman’s scythe in her neck, not in a less symbolic part of her body—such associations were secondary. What made the case interesting was the transformation from one kind of perception into a different one.
Rorschach’s main examples were not crossovers between seeing and hearing, the focus of most studies of synesthesia; instead they linked outward perception to inward bodily perception. They involved kinesthesia, our sensation of movement. He described how, “when I move my finger back and forth at arm’s length in total darkness and look in that direction, I believe I can see my finger moving even though this is completely impossible,” so the perception of movement must trigger a weak visual perception, parallel to one known from experience. Learning a song or a foreign language—or learning a word as a young child—he likewise described as creating a link between sound and movement, “an acoustic-kinesthetic parallel,” until the learner felt herself move her mouth to say the word whenever she heard it and vice versa.
These parallels could operate in both directions. One schizophrenic patient in Solothurn, A. von A., used to look out the window and see himself standing in the street. His double “copied” every movement he made—that is, the patient’s movements turned into a visual perception of his double, “traveling backwards along the same reflex hallucination path” as that of a schizophrenic who felt others’ movements in her own body.
In linking vision and movement along the pathway of empathy, Rorschach used the work of an obscure Norwegian psychophysicist, John Mourly Vold, whose two-volume treatise on dreams had bypassed Freud altogether and focused on kinesthesia. Mourly Vold described endless
experiments where parts of a sleeper’s body were tied or taped down, and the resulting dreams analyzed for how much movement they contained and what kind. Rorschach tried some of these experiments on himself. (One resulting dream was about stepping on the foot of a patient with the same last name as his boss.) It is hard to imagine two theories more completely alien to each other than Freud’s and Mourly Vold’s, but Rorschach integrated them: “Mourly Vold’s analysis of dreams in no way excludes psychoanalytic dream interpretation….The Mourly-Vold aspects are part of the building material, the symbols are the workers, the complexes are the construction supervisors, and the dreaming psyche is the architect of the structure we call a dream.”
Rorschach was straining to cast these mechanisms as universal. Only at the end of his dissertation did he acknowledge that perhaps not everyone had the abilities he had: “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.” He didn’t define what he meant by these “types” but clearly realized, however uneasily, that different people tended to experience different kinds of “parallels.” Because his own gifts of mimicry, realistic artistic ability, and empathy were the foundation for his new psychological ideas, he was reluctant to admit that they might be particular to him.
Like many dissertations, Rorschach’s ended up being less than definitive. He was forced to drastically shorten the final product, and he admitted in the dissertation itself, twice, that given “the relatively small collection of examples” it was “naturally impossible” to reach any final conclusions. But by paying such close attention to specific perceptions, in all their slippery transformations, he was starting to see the processes underlying them—laying the groundwork for a much deeper synthesis of psychology and seeing.
The Inkblots Page 10
