The Inkblots

by Damion Searls

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  The Great War was raging during the Rorschachs’ first years in Herisau, and even neutral Switzerland felt the effects: nationalistic rivalry between Swiss French and Swiss Germans, military service as noncombatants, rampant inflation. Having just returned to Switzerland when the war broke out, Rorschach had tried to volunteer at a military hospital with Morgenthaler. To no avail: “What are you thinking?” their superior at the Waldau had snapped. “Don’t you understand that it is your duty to stay right here?” Morgenthaler recalled Rorschach’s dark reaction: hanging his head in a bad mood for days, even quieter than usual, then mournfully observing that “now it’s the Germans’ duty to kill as many Frenchmen as possible, and the Frenchmen’s duty to kill as many Germans, while it’s our duty to sit here right in the middle and say ‘Good morning’ to our schizophrenic patients every day.”

  After moving to Herisau, Rorschach was able to serve. He and Olga volunteered for six weeks, helping to transport 2,800 mental patients from the French asylums in German-occupied territories to France, among other noncombat duties. He also followed the events of the war from his usual analytic distance. Contemptuous of the need to avoid anti-German sentiment by writing to his brother in French, he was equally repelled by the pro-German Swiss who opportunistically changed their tune at the end of the war: “There was a sudden reversal among the Germans in Switzerland as early as October [1918]: the more Kaiser-crazy they were before, the more they heaped curses on him afterward….It was worse than all their earlier arrogance. I will never forget the disgusting impression this crowd psychology made as long as I live.”

  Of greatest concern were the events in Russia. Shocking stories were reaching Switzerland in 1918, of shootings in Russia, executions, starvation, the entire intelligentsia being killed off. The Rorschachs were desperate to get news of Anna, still in Moscow, and Olga’s relatives. Anna returned to Switzerland in July, but it took two more years to get news of Olga’s family in Kazan, and the news was not good: Olga’s brother had “barely survived” a typhus outbreak, after which there was no further word.

  The pro-Bolshevik propaganda, “in defiance of all truth and humanity and common sense,” disgusted Rorschach equally in Switzerland and in Russia, and he turned his occasional newspaper writing in a more political direction, with articles railing against Western procommunist naïveté. He vented still more openly in his letters: “Have you read or heard about the pamphlet by Gorky where he condemns both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky for their petit-bourgeois message that the people should ‘merely suffer’? Have you ever seen such a fetid swamp! At least Judas Iscariot went off and hanged himself. I wonder what dreams Gorky has at night!”

  As always, he directed his sharpest attention to questions of perception:

  I’m only just beginning to see how it’s possible to get so many contradictory eyewitness reports out of Russia….The main thing is that it makes a huge difference whether an observer is seeing Russia for the first time or knew it in earlier days, and then also whether he knows anyone who can describe earlier Russia or only sees the amorphous mass of the people, who are actually not a people, just a mass….Whoever arrives in Russia for the first time now and didn’t know it before simply won’t see anything.

  The emphasis on the key term is Rorschach’s. A few months later: “What do you think of these communist parties springing up everywhere? Is there something here that I’m blind to, or are they the blind ones? As much as I try to use psychology and history to approach the question, I can’t answer it.”

  The Rorschachs’ financial situation was worse during the war, too. They continued to send whatever they could to the relatives in Russia, including such basics as soap; on one occasion, their gift to a loved one in Herisau was a candle. “At least we have always gotten enough coal during these years,” he wrote to Paul in 1919, “and this year it shouldn’t be any worse. Hopefully when you visit, you won’t have to freeze with us. In any case, we froze more during our winters in Schaffhausen.”

  As at other times, Rorschach made the best of his financial troubles. He didn’t care about clothes or drink alcohol; his only vice was cigarettes. Without money for a personal library, or support from Koller, he borrowed most of his books and journals, taking his extensive notes and making his endless excerpts. He transcribed furniture, too: when he had to go to Zurich on business, he would go into the city, spend a long time looking closely at the furniture and toy shops, then go back to Herisau and re-create what he had seen. “I am constantly in the woodworking shop, so that we get at least something new coming into the house,” he wrote to Paul. “I’ll soon graduate to more impressive looking things,” such as bookshelves, but for now he was building “a whole set for the little one: a table, three chairs, and a wash table built, painted in farmhouse style.”

  For Rorschach was now a father. His great joy in Herisau was the birth of his two children, Elisabeth (Lisa) on June 18, 1917, and Ulrich Wadim (the German spelling of “Vadim”) on May 1, 1919: “one genuine Swiss name and one genuine Russian name,” he told Paul, “for various reasons that you can easily imagine.” The boy was called Wadim, but he would hopefully not turn out too Russian: since his birthday, May 1, was the Russian Revolution’s holiday, Hermann joked to his brother, “I hope he won’t become too much of a rabid Bolshevik, though we do have to realize that our children will someday think of world struggles from completely different points of view than ours.”

  Anna made it out of Russia in August 1918 and married soon afterward; Hermann would see Paul again in 1920, on a visit from Brazil where he had escaped the war and become a successful coffee merchant. Paul was married, too, and brought his new wife, a Frenchwoman named Reine Simonne, on his visit to Herisau. Hermann found it deeply rewarding to see his siblings settled with partners they loved.

  As in the Münsterlingen years, Hermann and Lola visited Arbon when they could and Schaffhausen when they had to. Regineli continued to live with her mother in Schaffhausen, but Hermann invited her to Herisau for extended stays. She later remembered Hermann reading to her a lot at Herisau; it was at the foot of the Säntis, on a trip with her brother, that she once heard the sound of a church bell ringing through the clear air—her first great experience, she said decades later, the only time in her life she felt in contact with the infinite, the eternal.

  Rorschach’s study became the children’s playroom, when he was not seeing patients in it or writing. His cousin remembered him as an “excellent father” who “helped a great deal with the children’s upbringing, almost more than their mother.” He lavished on Lisa and Wadim the physical things he so rarely gave himself, making them all sorts of toys, pictures, and picture books; Lisa remembered one little drawing of a fruit she had thought was so real that she licked it until it blurred. For Christmas one year, his plans included carving “4 hens, 1 rooster, 5 chicks, turkey and turkey hen, peacock, 4 geese, 4 ducks, 1 shed, and 2 girls” for Lisa. Art not just for but of his children: “I’m hoping to send you some drawings of Lisa,” he wrote to Paul. “I’m producing a whole biography of her in pictures!” (See this page.)

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  But not all was well in the family. The Kollers lived right downstairs with three boys, and the youngest, Rudi, only four years older than Lisa, remembered the Rorschachs’ marriage as “very, very explosive.” Sophie Koller, the director’s wife and a good friend of Hermann’s, heard loud fights upstairs and was afraid of Olga. She thought Hermann was afraid of Olga too. Hermann’s staying up to work, typing late into the night, would lead to repeated arguments: “There he goes clattering away again,” Olga would rage. Regineli witnessed fights, tears, accusations, fits—one day, not long after Lisa was born, he got home late and Olga lost her temper. “It was terrible.” During fights, Olga was known to throw plates, cups, and coffeepots, to the point where the Rorschachs’ kitchen wall was permanently mottled with coffee stains.

  These outside impressions of Olga, negative though they are, reveal more than h
er own later reminiscences, which consistently idealized her marriage. What others recalled was a tempestuous, impulsive, voluptuous, dominating woman, and that was what Hermann loved about her. Descriptions of Olga as a “half-Asiatic” Russian—“Scratch a Russian and you’ll find a barbarian,” a common catchphrase, was applied to Olga—only show that the Swiss were largely unable to respect the outsider Hermann had married and loved. As a doctor stuck in Herisau without permission to practice, she must have felt far more isolated than he did. And for all her supposed stubbornness, the pair did end up back in Switzerland; their children were baptized Protestant, not Russian Orthodox as she had wanted.

  If Hermann felt it was a bad marriage, he never let it show. He always spoke well of Olga to Regineli, for example, and tried to explain Olga’s behavior, much as he had his stepmother’s. He loved Olga for drawing him out of his shell, for “giving him children,” for the life he felt he lived fully through her. The wallflower from Schaffhausen and event planner in Münsterlingen and Herisau almost never danced, even at parties where Olga in her black dress danced close with one patient after another. After fights, Hermann and Olga would ostentatiously walk arm in arm through the asylum.

  Their arguments about Hermann’s working hours must have had two sides too. He did work an enormous amount, which Olga saw as “Western” ambition, antisocial and misguided; one of their maids later said she felt Hermann did things for the children, such as making them toys and presents, more often than with them.

  At times, Rorschach found his job at the asylum satisfying. On a boat ride with family, after some years at Herisau, he said he felt that he meant something to his patients—he was not just a doctor but a real emotional and spiritual help for them, and that was rewarding. He and Olga gave slide-show lectures about Russia on winter evenings, and along with other personal development opportunities for the staff (sewing and embroidery classes for the female attendants, woodworking for the men), Rorschach pioneered medical training courses for the nursing personnel, with “Lessons on the Nature and Treatment of Mental Illness” in 1916. Nothing of the kind had ever taken place in a Swiss clinic.

  He was active again staging plays, for which he designed and built props, most notably some forty-five puppets for a Carnival shadow-play in February 1920. These whimsical creations—about ten to twenty inches tall, made of gray hinged cardboard—depicted the doctors, staff, and patients, including Rorschach himself. They were a hit with everyone in the audience, according to Rorschach’s diary, and they showed his ability to see and capture movement: “He could instantly cut out a cardboard silhouette and give it moving joints that enabled an astonishing reproduction of the figure’s characteristic movement, such as that of someone playing the violin” or doffing his baroque hat, a friend recalled. Still, having seen the Moscow theater and worked with some of the century’s greatest actors in Kryukovo, Rorschach knew full well that the asylum productions hardly measured up. Unlike in Münsterlingen, most of the patients at Herisau were too incapacitated even to watch the performances, much less take part. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: “My wife would like to see what a real theater looks like again—she has almost entirely forgotten.”

  Rorschach tried to put a positive face on his overtime duties, but he increasingly resented their demands on his time and the little artistic satisfaction they gave. As early as September one year, he would write: “My extra winter work is starting up again soon: theater, etc., not exactly fun. I will have to go to the woodworking shop to make up for it”; “As the years go by, it gets a bit tiresome.”

  The Rorschachs could not take vacations, because of money and work demands. Not until 1920 would he and Olga and the children enjoy their first real family holiday, at Risch on the Lake of Zug. “It’s very good for us,” Hermann wrote: “I drew a lot during the vacation, so at least Lisa will be able to remember the experience better.” Otherwise Hermann took hikes around the Säntis for a few days or traveled on business to give lectures in Zurich and elsewhere. One of these trips proved fateful.

  Hinged cardboard shadow figures made for Krombach Carnival: back showing construction; asylum administrator with account book, patient carrying buckets, night watchman with signal horn. Two drawings: girls playing. Credit 8

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  In mid-1917, while visiting the University Clinic in Zurich, Rorschach met a twenty-five-year-old Polish medical student named Szymon Hens for around fifteen minutes; they met briefly once more, later that year. Eugen Bleuler was Hens’s adviser, too, and had given him thirty dissertation topics to choose from. Hens had picked inkblots.

  Hens used eight crude black blots to measure his subjects’ imagination—how much they had or how little. Although he did connect certain responses to the subject’s background or individual personality, he did so superficially, purely by content: a hairdresser saw “a woman’s head, wearing a wig,” an eleven-year-old tailor’s son saw “a tailor’s dummy for fitting vests,” and this showed that jobs or parents’ jobs “had a strong influence on the imagination.” Mostly Hens just counted the number of answers, which the subjects had to write out themselves (twenty blots, one-hour time limit). There was not much more he could do, since he was testing a thousand schoolchildren, a hundred normal adults, and a hundred mental patients in the Burghölzli—an enormous undertaking. Hens later said that “his girlfriends” had helped him collect the results. While his dissertation ended with some suggestive ideas for future research, his own conclusions were very limited, for instance: “The mentally ill do not interpret the blots differently from healthy subjects in such a way as to permit diagnosis (at least at this time).”

  Rorschach had been in Herisau for two years, with his hard-to-treat patients worn smooth as pebbles. His article on Johannes Neuwirth, the deserter he had analyzed in 1914, was published in August 1917, with its clear implication that an ideal test would somehow combine and supersede the word association test, Freudian free association, and hypnosis. Hens’s dissertation, A Test of Imagination on Schoolchildren, Normal Adults, and the Mentally Ill Using Formless Blots, was published in December 1917, though Rorschach surely saw the text or heard about the experiment earlier, through Bleuler or from Hens himself. Everything came together.

  Rorschach realized how much deeper an inkblot experiment could go, but the first thing he needed was better images. He knew that there were some pictures you could feel your way into, that produced psychological and even physical reactions in the viewer, and others that didn’t. He started to make dozens, probably hundreds, of inkblots of his own, trying the good ones out on everyone he could find.

  Even Rorschach’s first efforts at Herisau were more accomplished than they might seem, with relatively complex compositions and an Art Nouveau–ish sense of design. Successive drafts (see this page) then simplified and clarified the blots, at the same time making them increasingly hard to pin down. The images hovered between meaninglessness and meaning, right on the borderline between all too obvious and not obvious enough.

  The comparison with Hens’s and Kerner’s blots makes the quality of Rorschach’s easier to see. Trying to interpret one of Hens’s blots feels forced: Well, you could say it looks like an owl, but it doesn’t really…Hens himself wrote, on his dissertation’s first page: “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 integr
ate the image into a whole (or not); they can be seen as human or inhuman, animal or nonanimal, skeletal or nonskeletal, organic or inorganic. They have a mystery about them as they strain at the edge of the intelligible.

  Top: Plate 8 from Szymon Hens’s dissertation. Bottom: Rorschach, early inkblot, no date and possibly not used in any test or experiment. Credit 13

  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.