The Inkblots

by Damion Searls

  These blind diagnoses did more than anything else to win over his peers, including Eugen Bleuler. Rorschach’s lecture at the Swiss Psychiatry Association conference in November 1919 was given to a sparse and skeptical audience. Several psychiatrists there accused him of being “too schematic,” though he noted in his diary that when he was able to explain the test to them personally, they came around. Undaunted, the man who had once written Haeckel for career advice and Tolstoy for an address handed his blots over to Europe’s leading psychiatrist and taught him how to use them.

  Bleuler was already intrigued: he had known about Rorschach’s inkblots since at least 1918, and on the train ride back from the 1919 conference he told Rorschach that “Hens really should have explored such things too, but he stayed stuck with imagination.” Fifteen years after trying out Freud on everyone at the Burghölzli, Bleuler started giving inkblot tests left and right, mailed Rorschach dozens of protocols for blind diagnosis, and marveled at Rorschach’s interpretations. Among these protocols were tests of all his children in June 1921—one, the future psychiatrist Manfred Bleuler, would publish an essay in 1929 investigating whether siblings produce results more similar to each other than nonsiblings (they do). As Rorschach wrote to a colleague, “You can easily imagine how eager I am to hear his report on how the blind diagnoses turned out,” and Bleuler’s postcard ten days later couldn’t have been more encouraging: the experiment was a success. “Amazingly positive with respect to the diagnoses, and the psychological observations and concepts were perhaps even more valuable,” Bleuler wrote. “The interpretations would retain their value even if the diagnostics were missing or wrong.” Rorschach’s mentor had “confirmed his results on every essential point.”

  Blind diagnoses were nearly all Rorschach had to work with aside from his asylum patients because, although he was eager to go into private practice, he was nervous about making the move with a growing family to support. He dropped hints to his brother in Brazil about “a certain plan, but it is so risky, and unfortunately still so presumptuous, that there is no way I can reveal it yet.” In 1919, after his two major lectures on sects, he wrote to a colleague that “the ‘klexography’ story has had further developments,” and “I recently gave two talks in Zurich about my sectarians. All dark things, you see! Black blots and black souls. But what’s starting to seem darkest of all, despite everything, is life under the yoke of the clinic. Maybe I’ll cast that off too some day.” A couple of months later, he wrote in his diary: “11/8. Thirty-fifth birthday. Hopefully my last in the clinic.”

  As a full-time psychoanalyst he could make more money and have more free time, aside from what he saw as the intrinsic rewards. “An analysis that goes well is something so stimulating, interesting, and alive that it’s hard to think of a greater intellectual and spiritual pleasure,” even if “one that goes badly is comparable only to the torments of hell.” But he also wanted to see a wider variety of patients “for the sake of the inkblot experiments.”

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  As he slowly gained access to more subjects, Rorschach became fascinated by how the inkblots seemed to not just diagnose illness but reveal the personality. In his 1918 manuscript, only one of the twenty-eight protocols Rorschach presented was from a nonpatient; in his eventual book, thirteen of the twenty-eight cases would be from normal subjects. Issues of introversion and extraversion, empathy and attachment, were increasingly coming to the fore, as his letters to Greti show. The keys to the personality, Rorschach decided, were Movement and Color.

  By February 1919, he had linked Movement responses to the core of the self: the more M’s, the greater a person’s “psychic inner life.” The number of M’s was proportional to the person’s “introverted energy, tendency to brood, and—take it with a grain of salt—intelligence.”

  People who gave more M’s didn’t literally move more quickly and easily; on the contrary, they internalized movement, they moved on the inside, or slowly, often being awkward or clumsy in practice. Rorschach said the most M’s he had ever received on an inkblot test was from a catatonic “completely sunk in his nirvana of introversion. He spent all day with his head down on the table, day after day, not moving all day; in the more than three years I’ve known him, he has had a grand total of two responsive days, otherwise he spoke not a word, year in and year out. To him, all the blots were full of movement.” In his dissertation, Rorschach had described feeling movement from visual sensations as a natural human ability, while acknowledging that it varied in different people. Now he had found that these differences were measurable and meaningful.

  As Movement responses became more crucial, Rorschach realized that coding them was “the trickiest problem in the entire experiment.” The difficulty was that “a bird in flight” or “a volcano erupting” were not true Movement responses, because a bird is naturally described as being in flight, a volcano as erupting. These were just turns of phrase, “rhetorical embellishments” or associations, rather than anything actually felt. And just as “sky” could be a Color response even without mentioning “blue,” a response could be coded M even if it didn’t mention movement, as long as Rorschach thought that the answer involved feeling a movement. An example he gave later was that, “based on my experience,” seeing Card I as “Two New Year’s mummers with brooms under their arms” is a Movement response. The shape doesn’t look much like these figures, Rorschach said, so a person would give that response “only if he felt himself into the shape, which always goes with a sensation of movement.”

  What made something an M response was empathetic identification, feeling-in: “The question is always: Is the subject actually empathizing with the movement?” But to answer that question, the examiner had to get around the subject’s words to what he or she was feeling inside. Rorschach’s initial idea, that when a person gave a Movement response you could see them move, was, he now realized, far too simplistic. A colleague who worked with Rorschach once described spending hours debating with him whether a single response to a single card should be coded as M.

  Rorschach also started to give Color responses a deeper psychological meaning. He had mentioned in his 1918 manuscript that more M’s typically went with fewer C’s and vice versa, but his main distinction was between Movement and static Form responses. At that point, he had very little to say about Color answers, except in his lists of typical test results for different varieties of mental illness. None of his earlier work had paid color much attention of any kind. Now he came to see that the relationships between Form, Movement, and Color were much more complex.

  Color responses seemed to be linked to emotion or feeling. Rorschach used the word affect to mean emotional reactions, whether feelings or expressions of feeling. A person’s “affectivity” was their mode of feeling, how they were “affected” by things. Rorschach found that subjects with a “stable affect”—an even keel and calm reactions, or insensitivity, or in pathological cases depression—consistently gave few or no Color responses. Subjects with a “labile” or volatile affect—strong, even hysterical reactions or oversensitivity, possibly mania or dementia—gave a lot of Color responses.

  Again, Rorschach failed to ground this insight in any theory, beyond the nearly universal folk wisdom that we react emotionally to color. He claimed only that he had noticed the correlation in practice. He also found surprisingly many test takers who were startled or unnerved by the color in the inkblots, especially in a colored inkblot after a number of black and white ones. Such people hesitated, “in a kind of stupor,” sometimes unable to give any answer at all. Rorschach called this “color shock” and claimed it was a sign of neurosis: a tendency to repress incoming stimulation that would otherwise be too much.

  Most people still gave mostly Form answers—describing the inkblot’s shape was the standard response, not especially diagnostic or revealing. But these answers, too, interacted with the other kinds of response. All M responses were, after all, forms in motion. Rorschach also found that more C r
esponses went with a worse perception of F (more F–, fewer F+), and vice versa. This made sense to him: The more a person’s emotions got in the way, the less able they were to rationally see what was really there. “Color,” he pointedly remarked in his diary, “is the enemy of form.” Only “a single group of normals combine good form visualization with unstable emotions,” he found: “neurotics and artists.”

  People generally integrated their emotional reactions more or less well into their conscious lives, of course, and the test yielded information about this, too, through the difference between C, CF, and FC responses. The rare pure C responses were signs of out-of-control affect, Rorschach claimed, and tended to be given only by the mentally ill “or notoriously hotheaded and hyperaggressive, irresponsible ‘normals.’ ” CF, with the C outweighing the F, meant the same thing to a lesser degree: “emotional instability, irritability, sensitivity, and suggestibility.” FC answers—based mainly on the shape but incorporating the color, such as “a purple spider” or “a blue flag”—were a kind of combined intellectual and emotional reaction. An FC answer reacted to the color but stayed in control.

  Normal people’s Color responses were mostly FC’s with well-seen forms. A poorly seen form in an FC response, on the other hand, indicated that the person might emotionally want to connect but be intellectually unable to: “When a normal person wants to give me a present, he looks for something I would like; when a manic gives a present, he gives something he likes. When a normal person says something, he tries to adjust it to our interest; a manic graciously says things that interest only him. Both of these manic people seem egocentric because their desire for emotional rapport is frustrated by an inadequate cognitive ability.”

  By the end of 1919, Rorschach had brought Movement, Color, and Form together in a single psychological system. If Color responses indicated emotional instability, then Movement responses were signs of stability: thoughtful, reflective groundedness. And if M’s meant introversion, C’s meant extraversion. A person would react, or overreact, to the outside world—as evidenced by a Color response—if the outside world was what they cared about.

  There were thus movement-predominant types, with “individualized intelligence, greater creative ability, more inner life, emotional stability, worse adaptation to reality, measured movements, physical awkwardness and clumsiness,” and color-predominant types, with “stereotyped intelligence, greater ability to copy, more outward-directed life, emotional instability, better adaptation to reality, restless movements, skill and agility.” Basically, introverts and extraverts. But a person giving almost all Form responses, with unusually few M’s or C’s, had neither set of abilities: this would be a cramped, pedantic, possibly obsessive personality. A lot of both M’s and C’s meant an expansive, balanced personality that Rorschach called “ambiequal.”

  Rorschach now had a formula: the ratio between M and C was a person’s “Experience Type”—the overall way they experienced the world. Taking the test in a good or bad mood might change the number of M and C responses, but not the proportion between them, which “directly expresses the mixture of introvert and extravert tendencies united in a given person.” This proportion was largely fixed, though it naturally changed over the course of one’s life, as Rorschach had told Greti. Insofar as the inkblots were being used to test personality, not diagnose mental illness, the Experience Type became the test’s single most important result.

  Even so, Rorschach wasn’t trying to classify people. Jung had previously discussed introversion and extraversion, but Rorschach modified Jung’s terminology to emphasize different capacities of the psyche, not different types of person: he wrote of “introversive” and “extratensive” tendencies, not introverted or extraverted personalities. The Movement-type person was not necessarily introverted but had the capacity to be introverted; the Color type had “the urge to live in the world outside himself,” whether he acted on that urge or not. These abilities didn’t cancel each other out—almost everyone could turn both inward and outward, though most people tended to use one or the other approach in most situations. Rorschach repeatedly insisted that the midline of his various charts, separating more M from more C, “does not represent a sharp boundary between two entirely different types: it is, rather, a question of more or less….Psychologically, the types cannot be said to be contrasting, any more than one can speak of movement and color as opposites.” Still, the Experience Type revealed “not how the person lives or what he is striving toward…not what he experiences, but how he experiences.”

  Rorschach may not have consciously remembered his youthful letter to Tolstoy, but he had fulfilled its dream. “The ability to see and shape the world, like the Mediterranean peoples; to think the world, like the Germans; to feel the world, like the Slavs—will these powers ever be brought together?” Movement responses were how we infuse life into the inkblots (seeing in them what we put in); Form responses were how we think the inkblots (process them intellectually); Color responses were how we feel the inkblots (react to them emotionally). Rorschach had found a way to bring these powers together, in ten cards.

  While he admitted that “it is always daring to draw conclusions about the way a person experiences life from the results of an experiment,” he was gaining in confidence and ambition, and as his publication delays dragged on through 1919 and 1920 he let himself be ever more daring. He generalized that “introversives are cultured; extratensives are civilized.” He called his whole era extraverted (scientific and empiricist) but felt that the pendulum was swinging back toward “old gnostic paths of introversion,” rejecting “disciplined reasoning” for anthroposophy and mysticism. The medieval bestiaries he was reading in his spare time seemed to him “beautiful examples of introverted thinking, not caring about reality—but the way people spoke about animals then, they speak about politics today!”

  He quipped that “if you know an educated person’s Experience Type, you can guess with some certainty his favorite philosopher: extreme introversives swear by Schopenhauer, expansive ambiequals by Nietzsche, cramped individuals by Kant, and extratensives by some fashionable authority, or Christian Science and such things.” He conjectured that sensations of movement were linked with earliest childhood memories, including his own. He linked different Experience Types to particular psychoses, claiming that introverted psychotics hallucinate bodily sensations or voices from within while extraverts hear voices from without. After a missionary from the Gold Coast of Africa gave a lecture and slideshow at Herisau, the Rorschachs invited him over, and Hermann suggested that the blots could be used to investigate “the psychology of primitives.” He mused on the philosophy of color, claiming that blue was “the favorite color of those who control their passions” (his own favorite color being gentian blue). And he ventured into analyzing visual art.

  Rorschach had become friends with Oberholzer’s cousin Emil Lüthy, a psychiatrist trained as an artist who regularly visited Herisau from Basel on weekends and was soon the man Rorschach trusted most about artistic matters. Before he left medicine and returned to art for good in 1927, Lüthy would give the inkblot test to more than fifty artists and would send Rorschach some of the most interesting protocols he would ever receive. Together they produced a table of various artistic schools and the experience types they represented—with Rorschach adding his typical caveat: “In truth, every artist represents an individuality of his own.” Rorschach and Lüthy would later correspond about developing a diagnostic test based purely on color.

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  While Rorschach was going deeper into the meaning of the inkblots, word was starting to get out about his discoveries. Rorschach was not a professor, but students, usually Bleuler’s, came to Herisau as unpaid volunteers, attracted more by the possibility of working with Dr. Rorschach than by Koller’s asylum. All things considered, they gave Rorschach less help and support than he was obliged to give them. But their interests and pursuits began to influence his shaping and presentation of t
he test.

  Hans Behn-Eschenburg started as a volunteer assistant doctor in August 1919. Rorschach introduced Behn to both Freud’s ideas and his own: “Whoever wanted to work with Rorschach on his percepto-diagnostic experiment had first to submit his own person to the ‘procedure,’ ” Behn-Eschenburg’s wife recalled. “Rorschach worked out a psychogram which he would show you and discuss with you very candidly. Not until this was done would he initiate you into working with his experiment.” Behn then started using the inkblots for his own dissertation.

  Behn gave the Rorschach test to hundreds of children and adolescents, yielding fascinating preliminary results when analyzed by age and gender. “The fourteenth year is a remarkable time of crisis,” Rorschach wrote in a synthesis of Behn’s findings. Teenagers’ personalities grow more extreme, girls usually more toward extraversion and boys toward introversion; then, the next year, their personalities constrict dramatically, boys more than girls, and they turn neurotic, “too lazy for it to be depression and too anxious for it to actually be laziness.” Still, he concluded, “Even when these findings are derived from 250 tests, the individual differences are so great, even at that age, that there needs to be much more material before such conclusions can be taken as facts.”

  Rorschach’s publication delays, and the simpler questions Behn was trying to answer, meant that Behn’s dissertation was going to be the first published account of Rorschach’s discovery, and Rorschach was concerned that it be unassailable and make a good impression. When Behn did not prove up to the task, Rorschach wrote whole sections of the dissertation himself. Despite the frustration and waste of time involved, Rorschach’s work with Behn called forth stronger statements about the scientific and human value of his accomplishment than he would offer elsewhere. He wrote a long letter talking through how Behn should discuss the inkblot experiment: