The project of Psychological Types had started with a case of incompatible views: while Freud thought everything was ultimately about sex, and Alfred Adler thought everything was ultimately about power, Jung’s work “sprang originally from my need to define the ways in which my outlook differed from Freud’s and Adler’s….In attempting to answer this question, I came across the problem of types; for it is one’s psychological type which from the outset determines and limits a person’s judgment.” In the book, Jung managed a delicate dance around his own limitations. Even as his whole project implied a kind of Olympian insight into all the different types, he again and again admitted his own partiality. He said outright that the desire for a total, overarching theory was a fact of his own psychology; that Freud was as right, in his way, as Jung was in his; that it had taken Jung years to recognize the existence and value of types other than his own; that his discussion of types unlike his own was inadequate.
As Jung knew perfectly well, seeing through another person’s eyes is all but impossible. “It is a fact constantly and overwhelmingly apparent in my practical work,” he wrote—a fact since confirmed by every comment section on the internet, one might add—“that people are virtually incapable of understanding and accepting any point of view other than their own….Every man is so imprisoned in his type that he is simply incapable of fully understanding another standpoint.” The greatness of Psychological Types results from Jung’s intuitive and analytical power combined with his decades-long effort to get outside of himself, despite everything.
Rorschach recognized the fundamental stakes of the book, and it brought him up short the way nothing else had. With his Jungian background, Rorschach was naturally asked to review the work, and in April 1921 he agreed. But the more he studied it, the less sure he was about how to incorporate its insights.
Admittedly, the book is a monster, with literally hundreds of pages on Indian Vedas, Swiss epic poetry, medieval Scholasticism, Goethe and Schiller, and whatever else could be shown to express the two poles of human experience. “I am reading Jung with mixed feelings,” Rorschach wrote in June: “There is a lot that is right, definitely a lot, but embedded in a very queer architecture.” Five months later:
I am now reading Jung’s Types for the third time and I still can’t bring myself to start the review I am supposed to write….In any case, I need to significantly rectify my earlier judgment about him. There really is an amazing amount in the book, and…for now I see no way to fault the deductive structure he lays out in contrast to Freud’s thought….I’m gnawing at the book, but as soon as I start to put something together, I become suspicious of my own ideas.
One of his complaints about isolation in Herisau was that “I really want to have a long conversation with someone about Jung at some point. The book has very many good things, and it is damned hard to say where the speculation goes off track.” In January 1922, he was still struggling: “I have to agree with Jung, who distinguishes conscious and unconscious attitudes and says that when the conscious is extraverted, the unconscious is compensatorily introverted. This terminology is of course hideous, these formulations brutally smashed together, but clearly the idea of compensation is very significant.” If nothing else, Jung had already argued for what Rorschach had thought was his own contrasting position: “Most cases have both introversive and extratensive aspects, every type is actually a mixture of the two.”
Psychological Types was forcing Rorschach to rethink his ideas—and his own psychology. “I thought at first that Jung’s types were purely speculative constructions,” Rorschach confided to his former patient, Pastor Burri. “But when I finally tried to derive Jungian types from the results of my own experiment, I saw that it was possible. This meant that, in resisting Jung, my own type had actually prejudiced me much more than I thought.”
In recognizing that his reactions revealed something about himself, Rorschach not only got to the heart of Jung’s theory but also built on his own previous insights. In his dissertation, he had acknowledged that “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.” In his diary, on January 28, 1920: “Again and again we run into the fact that introverts cannot understand how extraverts think and behave, and vice versa. And they don’t even realize that they are dealing with a different kind of person.” Now Jung had brought the problem to a head. If ideas came from a theorist’s personal psychology, then was any universal theory possible?
Jung had divided the world into eight distinct worldviews, but Rorschach’s framework risked an even more thoroughgoing relativism, shattering a unitary truth into a nearly endless variety of perceptual styles. Until Psychological Types, Rorschach had been able to use his own balance of different qualities to paper over the troubling implications of his inkblot experiment. A brilliant intuitive reader of test protocols, he also tried to put the results on a solid numerical basis. He had written that an examiner too inclined or too disinclined to Movement responses would have a hard time scoring tests properly—but he saw himself as able to strike the right balance. He always refused to call either Movement or Color types better or worse. Jung’s book confronted him with his own partiality, even the partiality of evenhandedness.
In his dissertation, Rorschach had had to admit that the psychology he described was his psychology; later, he thought that his inkblots had given him access to anyone and everyone’s way of seeing. But truly accepting that everyone was different would make it harder to claim that he could bridge those differences anyway.
—
While Rorschach was struggling with Jung, and with his neurotic patients, his ideas continued to develop, touching on many of the ways the test would evolve in the century to come. He moved away from Experience Type and the introvert/extravert balance as the main finding of the test. He started paying closer attention to the subject’s way of talking, frantic and compulsive or calm and relaxed. He raised questions that would define a century of debates: whether the examiner influenced the results; whether the test found permanent personality traits or reflected the test taker’s situation and passing mood; whether standardization made the test more reliable or merely more rigid; whether responses should be scored in isolation or seen in the context of the whole protocol. “My method is still in its infancy,” he wrote on March 22, 1922. “I am completely convinced that, after enough experience with the main inkblot series, ways forward to other, more specialized inkblots will open up, which will necessarily allow for significantly more differentiated conclusions.”
His approach remained cautious. Examiners, he wrote, seemed able to influence the content of responses much more than formal aspects of the protocol, “but of course systematic study of this is very necessary.” Even in a holistic approach, obtaining quantifiable data was essential: “A general view of the total findings must be retained to avoid being tripped up by the score for a particular variable, but even after a great deal of experience and practice, I consider it quite impossible to obtain a definite and reliable interpretation without doing the calculations.” As for being free to interpret results at will or tied down to more or less crude formulas, “a dilemma that comes up unfortunately quite often in the test,” Rorschach took the side of scientific objectivity: “All my work has shown me that crude systematization is better than arbitrary interpretation, if the situation is not clear in and of itself.”
New discoveries continued to surprise him. When the latest volunteer assistant at Herisau started giving the inkblot test to patients at the Deaf-Mute Clinic in St. Gallen, Rorschach expected the deaf-mutes to have many kinesthetic responses, but “that turned out to be entirely false: they are purely visual Small Detail (Dd) interpreters with almost no M responses!” In retrospect, it was “a finding that is very understandable, however unexpected.” He concluded from this and similar findings that it was far too soon to try to construct a t
heory to explain the inkblot test: only after much experience with a fuller range of subjects would the right theory “fall into place on its own.”
Roemer organized a conference in Germany with Rorschach as the main speaker, to give Rorschach the chance to meet colleagues abroad and share his new ideas. It was planned for early April 1922, around Easter. On January 27, Rorschach wrote to tell Roemer he would not be attending after all: “I have thought it over again and again, and finally decided it would be better to stay home. It’s very tempting, but first I want to be a bit more sure of certain points—too much is in flux at the moment. Of course there will always be something ‘in progress,’ even if I work on it for another hundred years, but there are a few points that are really bothering me, and I cannot free myself from these introverted hesitations no matter how much insight I have into their nature.” He wanted to familiarize himself further with others’ research and was especially hesitant to make any claims about vocational testing, as Roemer was pushing for. “Forgive me,” Rorschach wrote, “and let us hope there will be another chance before long.”
Hermann Rorschach, age one and a half, 1886
Age six, in Swiss folk costume, 1891
Age twenty-one, as a medical student, 1905
Hermann’s parents, Ulrich and Philippine
Sister Anna, 1911
Hermann, Anna, Paul, Ulrich, and stepmother Regina, around the time of Ulrich’s remarriage, 1899
Life in Scaphusia (1901): Hermann is second from right, with hand on stein.
Horns, steins, swords, and sashes: Hermann is third from right, in dark bow tie, holding a book.
Olga in Zurich, ca. 1905, age twenty-seven
Zurich (?), ca. 1906–8
Wedding photo, May 1, 1910
Paul, Hermann, Regineli, and Regine in Münsterlingen, ca. 1911
Olga and Hermann in gypsy costume, with Olga’s new guitar, Christmas 1910
Hermann holding daughter Lisa, 1918
Hermann in his office in the Herisau apartment, cigarette in hand, 1920
Rowing on Lake Constance, ca. 1920
On a hiking trip in the Säntis, September 1918
Hermann, Lisa, Wadim: summer 1921
March 1922 came in like a lion and went out like a freezing lion. Spring snowstorms blanketed Switzerland, especially the high mountain country around Herisau. On Sunday, March 26, Rorschach had the day off and took Olga to see Ibsen’s Peer Gynt in St. Gallen. The next morning, he woke up with stomach pain and a slight fever. The following week he was dead.
Olga had said that his stomach pains were nothing—friends of Hermann’s still held it against her decades later. The bumbling Dr. Koller said not to worry, it was just a stomachache and would get better on its own; the doctor summoned from St. Gallen, Dr. Zollikofer, thought it was likely gallstones and recommended drinking lots of fluids. The Behn-Eschenburgs saw Rorschach walking through the halls that week bent almost double, and made a scene, saying something was seriously wrong, but Olga refused to do anything. She thought it was nicotine poisoning, which Hermann had had before, with pain so severe that he’d had to hold on to the banister to keep from falling when he climbed the stairs. The Rorschachs’ maid had recently had an inflamed finger that prevented her from doing chores, and Olga had forced Hermann to lance it; the maid got an infection and had to be hospitalized, prompting the doctor to yell at Hermann about it, so now Hermann did not want to bother him again. Martha Schwarz, the competent nurse Rorschach was friends with, had left Herisau; more than forty years later, still upset, she insisted that if she had been in Herisau, Rorschach wouldn’t have died.
At last Olga called Emil Oberholzer in Zurich, who hurried to Herisau with a physician: Paul von Monakov, son of the same Dr. Constantin von Monakov who had been unable to save Hermann’s father Ulrich. Oberholzer saw at once that it was appendicitis and summoned a surgeon from Zurich, but snow covered everything and the surgeon got lost, driving to a town fifteen miles away instead of to Herisau. He arrived late and exhausted—a substantial delay, with Hermann in the bathroom, groaning, the snow still falling outside. The ambulance didn’t get him to the hospital until 2:30 in the morning, half dead. He died in the operating room, at 10:00 a.m. on April 2, 1922, of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix.
Olga wrote to Paul in Brazil with the stunning news and details about Hermann’s last days:
He suddenly said to me, “Lola, I don’t think I’m going to make it.”…He talked about his work, his patients, about death, about me, our love, about you and Regineli, his dear ones! He said, “Say goodbye to Paul for me, I so wish I could have seen him,” and sobbed when he said it, and then: “In a way it is a beautiful thing, to leave in the middle of life, but it is bitter.” “I have done my part, now let others do theirs” (he meant his scientific work).
Even at the end, her letter makes clear, Hermann seemed to trust others’ views of him more than his own.
He said to me: “Tell me, what kind of a person was I? You know, when you’re living your life you don’t think much about the soul, about your self. But when you’re dying, that’s what you want to know about.” I told him: “You were a noble, faithful, honest, gifted man.” He: “Do you promise?” “I promise,” I said. “If you swear it to me, then I believe it.” Then I brought the children in and he kissed them, tried to laugh with them, then I took them away….
All the recognition he was receiving made him freer and more self-confident. But he still acted modest and ordinary. It made him look better too! Refreshed, in good spirits. I always said: “My handsome husband! Do you know what a beautiful, handsome man you are?” and he just laughed and answered, “I’m glad that’s what I am in your eyes, I don’t care what anyone else thinks.”
She wrote of his joy in fatherhood, how after “so many losses when he was young, he wanted so badly to give his children a ‘golden childhood,’ and he could have, with his own bright mind and golden character.” And whatever her earlier feelings about Hermann’s work—now racked with guilt over not appreciating him enough when she could—she formed the image of her husband that she would cling to until her own death forty years later:
Did you know that he was a rising force in science? His book caused a stir. People were already working with “the Rorschach method” and talking about the “Rorschach test,” and about the first-rate brilliant ideas of a new psychology he had invented….His scientist friends here said his death was an irreplaceable loss; he was the most gifted psychiatrist in Switzerland! He was genuinely highly gifted, I know it. Recently, all kinds of new ideas and trains of thought were just bubbling out of him, he wanted to take in everything….
I feel like we were right on the threshold to a better future—and now he’s gone.
Oskar Pfister, who had remained a friend and supporter “awestruck” by Rorschach’s abilities, wrote on April 3 to tell Freud that “yesterday we lost our ablest analyst, Dr Rorschach. He had a wonderfully clear and original mind, was devoted to analysis heart and soul, and his ‘diagnostic test,’ which would perhaps better be called analysis of form, was admirably worked out.” He described Rorschach personally and tried one last time to intervene on the test’s behalf: “He was a poor man all his life, and a proud, upright man of great human kindness; his death is a great loss to us. Can you not do something to verify his really magnificent testing system, which is certain to be of great service to psychoanalysis?”
At 2 p.m. on April 5, another day of nasty weather, Rorschach’s funeral was held in a hurry at the Nordheim Cemetery in Zurich. Olga told Paul: “I did not want to leave him in Herisau. Zurich was ‘our city’ in every way. The city of our love, let him rest there now!” Pfister gave the religious service; Bleuler, never one to gush, called Rorschach “the hope of an entire generation of Swiss psychiatry.” Years later, Emil Lüthy remembered looking through the window in the coffin at Hermann’s “strongly suffering, pained face.” There were “many wreathes, many many physicians, speeches,” Olga
wrote to Paul, and “a very beautiful funeral oration” from Rorschach’s college friend Walter von Wyss: “I found in him a seeking after the highest things, a deep drive to understand fully the human soul and to bring himself into harmony with the world. His wonderful ability to put himself in the positions of all sorts of other people was striking. He was an individualist, precisely because he had something of his own to give, as only a rare few do.” When Ludwig Binswanger published an essay on Psychodiagnostics in 1923, he lamented the loss of “the creative leader of a generation of Swiss psychiatrists,” with his “extraordinary art of scientific experimentation, genius at human understanding, brilliant psychological dialectics, and sharp logical reasoning….Where others saw only numbers or ‘symptoms,’ he instantly had before his eyes inner psychological connections and interrelations.”
The Inkblots Page 19
