Especially with findings of psychosis, the test results could be compelling enough to override what he had before his eyes. When 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 draftsmanship must be correlated with, or similar to, the illness. “Naturally,” he wrote, answers that seem similar “will be qualitatively very different” 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 self-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 patient’s condition has not significantly changed.” With ten cards, and room for multiple answers on each card, an especially 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 (WF+), 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 decoder for what a given answer meant. Worse still, Rorschach could offer no 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.
When Rorschach pitched a book publisher, he put it this way: “It concerns a very simple experiment, which—not to mention for the moment its theoretical ramifications—has a very wide range of applications. It permits not only the individual diagnosis of psychological illness profiles but also a differential diagnosis: whether someone is neurotic or psychotic or healthy. With healthy individuals, it gives very far-reaching information about the person’s character and personality; with the mentally ill, the results let us see their former character, which is mostly still there behind a psychosis.” It was also a new kind of intelligence test, in which “someone’s level of education, or good or bad memory, never conceals their true level of intelligence.” The inkblots “permitted conclusions not about a person’s ‘overall intelligence’ but about the numerous individual psychological components which constitute the person’s various intelligences, predispositions, and talents. Especially in this regard, the theoretical advance is not insignificant.”
“I believe I may safely say that the experiment will arouse interest,” he concluded with a touch of false modesty. “I would like to inquire if you might be inclined to publish it.”
On Sunday, October 26, 1919, a lively young woman named Greti Brauchli came to visit Hermann, Olga, and the children in Herisau. She was the daughter of Ulrich Brauchli, Rorschach’s former boss, and Rorschach had tried his earlier inkblots out on her in Münsterlingen back in 1911 and 1912 when she was a teenager. Now she was in her midtwenties, engaged to be married, too leftist for her father’s taste. The inkblot experiment, too, had come into its own.
Rorschach had visited the Brauchlis in Münsingen earlier that October and showed Ulrich the test. “He understood it!” Rorschach noted with delight afterward: Ulrich Brauchli was one of the first people “who truly understood the experiment and had something to say about it.” When Greti arrived in Herisau, Rorschach was preparing to present his experiment to a professional audience in a lecture to the Swiss Psychiatry Association in Freiburg, Germany. He arranged to meet Greti at the museum in St. Gallen, on October 29, to try the blots out on her. It was not often that he found such thoughtful subjects for his experiment.
He quickly interpreted her test and mailed her the results, and Greti was stunned. “Thank you for your report! I’m not surprised, but I am amazed to see how right you were about everything, at least as far as I can tell (we all know how often psychological self-descriptions are wrong).” She was especially struck at his discovering sides of her “that very few people know—how did you do it?” And she was full of questions, about her results and also the deeper mysteries: “Do you think psychological facts are inalterable givens that people simply have to work with their whole lives and accept for what they are? Does a person stay the same, psychologically speaking, or is it possible to change and develop through self-knowledge and will? It seems to me that we have to be able to, otherwise the person is a dead thing, a fixed fact, not a living creating being.”
Rorschach wrote a warm reply explaining how he had reached his conclusions. Greti’s attention to Small Details had revealed the tendency to pedantry she usually kept so well hidden; her many Movement responses showed a rich imagination she didn’t know she had; the feelings of “emptiness and aridity” that she had told him about in her letter were probably a side effect of her suppressing this imagination, rather than being due to depression. She had asked what the difference was between what he had called her “easy affective adaptation” and her “strong empathetic ability,” and he explained that conforming to others’ emotions is not the same as empathy in the strong sense, the capacity to enter into and share others’ experience: “Those with intellectual disabilities can adapt their feelings to others’ too, even animals can, but only an intelligent person with an inner life of their own has empathy….Under certain circumstances, it can escalate almost to a feeling of identity with the person you’re empathizing with or whatever you’re feeling your way into, for example with good actors who learn a great deal from others.” As usual, he found the ability to feel at its best in women: “Emoti
onal adaptability plus the capacity for empathy is a primarily feminine attribute. The combination results in an empathy charged with feeling.” An even richer combination is “if the adapting psyche is capable of introversion, too—then it will be a sounding board that resonates much more strongly with everything that happens.” Greti had it all.
To Greti’s big question, he answered that psychological states are not permanent. “Probably the only thing impossible to change by working on oneself is how one’s introversion and extraversion relate to each other, although the relationship does shift over the course of one’s life because of a kind of maturation process. That process doesn’t end at age twenty but continues, especially between thirty and thirty-five and again at around fifty.” This was days before his own thirty-fifth birthday.
He also realized that Greti’s questions were more than theoretical: her fiancé needed help. Rorschach had met him in Münsingen on November 2, on his way back from the conference, noting in his diary: “Pastor Burri, Greti’s bridegroom: unassuming, quiet, slow, but intelligent and lively for all his slowness.” Now that Rorschach had told Greti people could change, she encouraged her future husband to see him for psychoanalysis. And after two nervous letters, Hans Burri, or as Rorschach liked to call him in private “my compulsive neurotic clergyman,” started therapy.
Rorschach soothed Burri’s fears of being “influenced” or “manipulated” in therapy by saying that that was not how it worked: “An analysis must never be a direct manipulation, and any indirect manipulation comes from the patient’s own soul. Thus you are not actually being influenced, but unfolding your destiny.” Worried at first about the conflict between psychoanalysis and his religious beliefs, Burri came to feel that Rorschach respected his views, and others’ views as well: even when they discussed the Binggeli and Unternährer sects, Burri noted that Rorschach was never dismissive or sarcastic.
In his role as a therapist, Rorschach was nonthreatening and sympathetic. But he refused to discuss much with Burri in writing: actual therapy, unlike sharing insights with Greti, had to take place in person. He told Burri to start writing down his dreams, drawing on the insights of his dissertation to tell him how: “Here is a technique you may find useful for retaining and remembering your dreams: When you wake up, stay lying completely still and go over the dream in your mind. Only then write it down immediately. Kinesthesias are most likely the carriers of our dreams, and these are instantly thwarted by actual innervations as soon as we physically move.” Rorschach’s methods were not classically Freudian—the sessions were sometimes five times a week, but not always; he often spoke and interrupted, rather than sitting silent and impassive; after each session the pastor would stay for coffee or tea and a chat, joined by Olga, whom Greti thanked by mail for her hospitality. But the basic principles were Freudian. The difference was the new tool Rorschach had at his disposal.
Once Burri started traveling to Herisau for therapy, in January, Rorschach gave him an inkblot test. Burri’s seventy-one responses—an enormous number—pinpointed the many problems he was suffering from: excessive self-monitoring, inability to show emotion, pedantic thoroughness, constant brooding, compulsive fantasies, tormenting doubts, a grumbling inability to finish anything, lack of warmth in his approach to life….After five months, Burri took the inkblot test again, and the results showed how much he had “changed in the course of the analysis; his ‘reflexive spasm’ of consciously, compulsively monitoring every thought and experience has disappeared.” Burri was more adaptable; his “emotional approach and rapport were steadier”; his access to his inner life was “more free and more powerful,” with more original answers and more than twice as many Movement responses as before. While Burri’s “kind of intelligence had changed the least,” as Rorschach had reassured him it wouldn’t, his compulsive suppression of inner impulses “had changed quite completely.”
Greti’s question had been answered in the real world—people can change, can heal—and Rorschach ended treatment, having achieved near-miraculous results that Burri and Greti would always be grateful for. Greti wrote him: “Thank you for everything. Your treatment of him was such a success, it was the best thing for him, and you can imagine how happy that makes me!” Four months later, the Burris invited the Rorschachs to their wedding.
While Rorschach was using the inkblots in the service of psychoanalysis, his therapeutic practice—and intelligent questioning from test takers like the Burris—also deepened his understanding of the test. “I have learned a lot from you,” Rorschach wrote to Hans Burri when sharing the results of his second test. His advice to Burri about how to remember dreams would eventually go into his book on the experiment nearly word for word. This was possible because he had not yet been able to publish it.
—
By February of 1920, when he wrote his pitch about the “very simple experiment,” Rorschach had been trying to publish the test for a year and a half. This pitch was not his first, nor would it be his last. There would be another year and half of delays before the test would appear in print.
The main problem was the images. And, as always, money. It was going to be expensive to print the inkblots, especially the ones in color. In Rorschach’s first submission of the 1918 version to a journal, he suggested printing only one color blot and several black-and-white blots, perhaps greatly reduced in size. The editor was a longtime supporter and friend of Rorschach’s, but he suggested Rorschach pay for it himself; that was impossible. Then he gave Rorschach the name of a foundation that might help fund the publication, but nothing came of that either. As publishers continued to balk, Rorschach suggested reducing the size by up to one-sixth, or printing all the blots small on a single sheet, or replacing the colors with different cross-hatching, or even producing a version where buyers would color in the pictures themselves. “Such primitive measures these all are!” he wrote.
This increasingly frustrating struggle for publication dogged Rorschach’s professional life for three years. It also deepened and enriched the test. As Rorschach sent letter after letter, telegram after telegram, to his prospective publishers and better-connected colleagues—professional in tone, then pleading, then threatening, then desperate—his understanding of the inkblots continued to grow. He became more proficient in the new method and gained insight into what lay behind it. Facing pressure to change the test in various ways, he realized what he could compromise on and where he had to draw the line. By January 1920, he was “happy that it hadn’t been printed in its 1918 form—the whole work has grown into a much bigger thing today, and even if the basic facts of the 1918 draft don’t need to be changed, there is still a lot to add. The [wartime] paper shortage in 1918, and my desire to say as much as possible in as small a space as possible, made that version worse in many ways.” Still, the time had come. “I have now been working on the experiment for years: something needs to get published already.”
One effect of the delays was to give Rorschach time to collect a larger sample of results. By the fall of 1919, he had tested 150 schizophrenics and 100 nonpatients with identical images—for of course, as he pointed out, the results could be tabulated only when the same test series was used. The number soon grew to 405 cases—a good-sized sample that made the findings in his eventual book more convincing and let him define “Original” answers quantitatively, as those occurring no more than once every hundred tests. He was starting to shift from a subjective judgment of good and bad answers to a more objective measure of whether an answer was common or uncommon. As he put it at one point in a lecture—probably exaggerating slightly for effect, and invoking a local Appenzell tradition for his St. Gallen audience:
Subjectively, I feel about Plate 1 for example that the only good answer is Two New Year’s mummers with coats billowing, one on each side, and in the middle a female body without a head, or with the head bent forward. But the most common answers are: A butterfly, An eagle, A crow, A bat, A beetle, A crab, and A rib cage. None of these answers
seem well seen to me, subjectively, but since intelligent normal people have given them many times, I have to count them as Good and Normal answers—all except for the crab.
Also in 1919, Rorschach started checking the accuracy of the test’s results the only way he could: by performing blind diagnoses. In fact, he is credited with having coined the term blind diagnosis for test evaluation in the absence of personal contact. Rorschach found people who could administer inkblot tests, send him the protocols to score and interpret without knowing anything else about the subject, and then tell him whether his interpretations were right or wrong, starting with his closest friend, Emil Oberholzer, a former assistant of Bleuler’s who had gone into private practice in Zurich. He mentioned in his 1920 book pitch that “the control experiments were as follows: I diagnosed people entirely unknown to me—healthy, neurotic, and psychotic—on the basis solely of test protocols. The error rate was less than 25 percent, and by far the majority of these errors would have been avoided if I had known, for instance, the sex and age of the subject, which I had intentionally decided not to be told.”
Rorschach was always a bit ambivalent about blind diagnoses. He saw them as useful only for control experiments and examiner training, and while he considered publishing several of them, he also worried that “it looks so much like a magician’s sleight-of-hand parlor trick or something.” At the same time, this was the only way he could significantly expand his range of test subjects beyond the schizophrenics in his asylum. “Where in Herisau am I supposed to get the material I need,” he would lament at one point, “the great artists, the virtuosos, the highly productive types, etc., not to mention the balanced individuals?!!? In Herisau!”
The Inkblots Page 15
