The Inkblots
Page 14
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 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 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 and cool colors recede: in the inkblots, red would confront the test taker more aggressively than any other color, demanding that we react, or suppress a reaction. Red appears brighter to the human eye than other colors at the same saturation—the Helmholtz-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. (Anthropologists 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 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 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 this page), 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 this page] 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 actually might be.
People’s answers started to reveal more than Rorschach had thought possible: higher or lower intelligence, character and personality, thought disorders and other psychological problems. The inkbl
ots 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 connections he would go on to find. But his talent was to notice a pattern, 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 are no surviving notes or dated drafts, no letters from Rorschach to anyone 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. He 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 forget-me-not, a red shape as alpenglow. To call a blue area “the sky” would be a Color response, even without explicitly saying “the blue sky,” because 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 taking the shape into account somewhat (a gray blot as “a rock,” even if the shape was not especially bouldery, or a splash of red as “blood”), or Form-Color responses (FC), mainly based on shape but with color playing a secondary role (“a purple spider,” or “a blue flag” for a blue rectangular shape).
Answers that described shapes moving in the cards, such as “bears dancing” instead of just bears, or “two elephants kissing,” or “two waiters bowing to each other,” were Movement responses (M). This was the least obvious of Rorschach’s categories—why should it make a difference 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 answers—what 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 how well they saw. A Form response would be marked as F+ for a well-seen form, F– for 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 head 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.
Rorschach invented other visual tests in 1917–18 and used them to supplement or confirm his findings, but he gradually abandoned them as unnecessary as his expertise with the test grew.
Movement: Rorschach copied, without ax or setting, Ferdinand Hodler’s image of a woodcutter, which had been on fifty-franc banknotes since 1911 and was universally known in Switzerland. He then held it up to a window and traced the picture in reverse. He showed people both images and asked: “What is the man doing?” and “Which of the two do you feel is drawn correctly?” People who had given many Movement responses had no difficulty with the first question and could not answer the second, apparently able to feel into each image equally well. Those who gave few or no M responses answered both questions easily. Hodler’s image shows a left-handed woodsman, like the image above right, but normal right-handed people said it matched them because they felt-into the action as a mirror image of their own (vice versa for the left-handed).
Form: According to Rorschach, a schizophrenic might call the Australia blot below “Africa, but not the right shape,” because the blot is black and black people come from Africa. He also made a blot of Italy that schizophrenics called “Russia” [in German, Russland] because it was lampblack [Lampenruss].
In his 1918 essay outlining the test, Rorschach described typical results for dozens of different subvarieties of mental illness, always careful to state when he lacked a sufficient number of cases in Herisau to generalize safely. He 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 Small 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.