These eulogies and Olga’s letters are not the only glimpse we have into the end of Rorschach’s life—other views paint a darker picture. When Behn-Eschenburg came out of the operating room and told Olga and his own wife, Gertrud, that Hermann had died, Olga turned to Gertrud and said, “I hope the same thing happens to you!” The maid said that Olga “threw herself on the floor and screamed like an animal.” Olga tried to throw her children out the window, and had to be physically restrained: “I can’t stand to see them,” she screamed. “I hate them, they remind me of him!” Lisa was four years old, Wadim almost three. Olga couldn’t be left alone, and Gertrud Behn-Eschenburg stayed with her for two straight weeks, sleeping in the family apartment. It was she who later described Olga by quoting the saying “Scratch a Russian and you find a barbarian.” Most cruelly of all, after Hermann’s half-sister Regineli had stomach pains at the funeral and was operated on for appendicitis, and everything went well, Olga accused her of wanting appendicitis just because Hermann had it. She refused to believe that Regineli had really needed the operation.
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Rorschach’s favorite quote was by the Zurich writer Gottfried Keller, whose beautiful novel Green Henry is the most visual of the classic nineteenth-century bildungsromans. He often recited the last two lines of Keller’s most famous poem, “Evening Song.” He inscribed them on the last page of the Rorschach family chronicle he made for Paul, and on gifts to the Koller boys; he put the lines on his son’s birth notice and quoted them on his deathbed.
The poem celebrates the glory of the visual world and the human drive, doomed but noble, to take in as much of that glory as possible. “Eyes, my dear little windows, / Give me a little longer the fairest glows / Of vision,” it opens, before describing impending death:
Be kind, let the images in,
For someday you too shall grow dim!
No sooner shall the light have ceased
And the tired lids close than the soul shall have peace;
She will fumblingly take off her walking shoes
And lay herself down in the coffin’s gloom.
Still, she will see two glimmering sparks,
Like two little stars in the inner dark,
’Til they, too, waver and finally die,
As though by the wing of a butterfly.
The poem ends, in the lines Rorschach loved, with a hymn to vision:
And still will I roam in the evening field,
With only the sinking star for a friend;
Drink in, oh eyes, all your lashes can hold
Of the golden abundance of the world!
“Abundance” also means “overflow”—in German, the word is an image of a cup or vessel brimming over.
In his thirty-seven years, Hermann Rorschach did drink in the overflow of the world. He created a window into the soul that we have been peering through for a century, then died before he could respond to the biggest challenge to his legacy. Was the test effective only because of Rorschach’s own psychology? Were his interpretations a uniquely personal art, or could the test endure beyond him? Whatever the answers to these questions, the inkblots were now let loose on the world, without his guiding hand and eye.
In 1923, David Mordecai Levy, a thirty-one-year-old psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, was director of the first Child Guidance clinic in the country, the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute in Chicago. It had been opened in 1909 with the help of Jane Addams, founder of social work in America and eventual winner of the Nobel Peace Prize; Child Guidance, a Progressive Era crusade to address children’s physical and mental health problems by listening to “the child’s own story” and looking at children in their social and family context, was a perfect match for Levy, a perceptive observer and sensitive listener.
Now Levy was stepping down for a year abroad, during which he planned to work on child psychoanalysis with a Swiss psychiatrist: Rorschach’s friend Emil Oberholzer. He was in the process of posthumously publishing Rorschach’s virtuosic 1922 lecture, and in 1924, when Levy returned to Chicago to take up the directorship of the mental health clinic at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, he had in his luggage a copy of Rorschach’s lecture, book, and inkblots. So it was two years after Rorschach’s death—either at the Michael Reese clinic, or at the Institute for Juvenile Research under Illinois’s Department of Criminology, or perhaps in Levy’s private Chicago practice—that for the first time in America someone was shown the ten inkblots and was asked: “What might this be?” Before going on to have a long and successful career, in which he invented play therapy and coined the term sibling rivalry, Levy published Rorschach’s essay in English, gave the first US seminar on the Rorschach, and taught a generation of students what the test was and how to use it.
Hermann Rorschach’s life was rooted in Switzerland, at the crossroads of Germany and France, Vienna and Russia. Rorschach’s afterlife would be global, as the inkblots spread around the world, popularized or not in various countries through very different chains of circumstance. The test’s midcentury champion in Switzerland discovered antidepressants; its advocate in England was a child psychologist who published an article during the Blitz called “The Bombed Child and the Rorschach Test.” In one of the first countries to introduce the Rorschach, Japan, it was popularized by the inventor of a concentration test still mandatory for close to a million employees in public transportation agencies. The Rorschach remains the most popular psychological test in Japan, while it has fallen completely out of favor in the United Kingdom; it is big in Argentina, marginal in Russia and Australia, on the rise in Turkey. All these developments have their own histories.
It was in the United States, though, that the test first came to fame, had its most dramatic rise to prominence and descent into controversy, penetrated deepest into the culture, and played a part in many of the historical milestones of the century.
The test in America was a lightning rod from the start. Which is more trustworthy, hard numbers or expert judgment? Or maybe the question is: Which should we distrust less? This has always been the key debate in American social science—indeed, in much of American life. The mainstream position, even in the early twentieth century, was to trust the numbers.
There was widespread skepticism in American psychology of anything going beyond what the hard data could prove. Especially after controversial calls to segregate or sterilize people found to be “feebleminded,” psychologists believed more than ever that it was crucial not to draw wild conclusions from tests but to use “psychometrics,” the science of quantitative, objectively valid measurements. The leading theories in psychology were behaviorist, emphasizing what people actually do, not the mysterious mind allegedly behind their actions.
Yet there remained an opposed tradition, reinforced by Freudian ideas and other philosophies imported from Europe, which mistrusted what it saw as cold, hyper-rational science. Psychotherapists, having worked with real people in complex situations, often respected the truths of psychoanalysis, irrational though they were, as more powerful and convincing than the usual arguments of logic. They recognized that objective measurement had its limits when it came to human psychology.
Today it is psychiatrists who tend to be “hard scientists” while psychologists use “softer” therapies, but in the early twentieth century the poles were reversed: Freudian psychiatrists dismissed research psychologists as bean counters, while academic psychologists trumpeted their hardheaded science background against Freudian mystics and approaches resistant to objective measurement.
And now here were ten inkblots. Was a Rorschach scientific and quantitative, like a blood test, or did it yield results open to creative, humanistic interpretation, like talk therapy? Was it science or art? Rorschach himself had realized in 1921 that the inkblot test falls between two stools, too touchy-feely for the scientists and too structured for the psychoanalysts:
It comes out of two different approaches: psychoanalysis and academic research psychology. So that means the research
psychologists find it too psychoanalytical, and the analysts often don’t understand it because they stay clinging to the content of the interpretations, with no sense for the formal aspect. What matters, though, is that it works: it gives amazingly correct diagnoses. And so they hate it all the more.
If anything, Rorschach understated the problem, since the test’s psychiatric use—diagnosing patients—lacked any real grounding in psychology, any theory that explained why, say, introversion or extraversion produced Movement or Color responses. Psychologists couldn’t help but be baffled by psychiatrists’ apparently effective use of the test. But saying that the test was destined for controversy, leading even to hatred—Rorschach was right about that.
—
The two most influential early Rorschachers in America personified the divide almost perfectly. In the fall of 1927, back from another year in Switzerland spent working on the Rorschach, David Levy was head of the New York Institute for Child Guidance. In its halls, he ran into a discouraged older student at a loss for a dissertation topic. Levy loaned him a copy of Psychodiagnostics and Rorschach’s 1922 essay. It was a good tip.
That student was Samuel Beck (1896–1980), born in Romania, who had come to America in 1903 and done so well in school that by age sixteen he was on fellowship to study classics at Harvard, where he overlapped with Levy. When his father fell ill, Beck went back to Cleveland, Ohio, to support the family, working as a reporter—a psychological education in itself: “I saw some of the best murderers that a big city has, the best robbers, bootleggers, and embezzlers.” After a decade of real life, he returned to Harvard, graduated in 1926, and went to Columbia to study psychology, wanting to find out “by scientific method what the human being is like.”
The inkblot test would become his life’s work. Beck published the first American articles on the Rorschach, starting in 1930 (“The Rorschach Test and Personality Diagnosis”); completed the first American dissertation on the Rorschach, in 1932; and went to Switzerland himself in 1934–35, where he too befriended and worked with Oberholzer. He returned and followed Levy to Chicago.
The psychoanalyst to Beck’s research psychologist was Bruno Klopfer (1900–1971), a German Jew, improvisational and antiauthoritarian, the rebellious son of a banker. He had terrible eyesight at a young age from an undiagnosed condition and had been forced to “make up through his keen thinking what he could not see with the visual clarity of the other school boys.” It was a perfect symbol for the man who would become America’s most prominent and suspect Rorschach interpreter: he might not have seen the thing himself, but he could convince you he understood what you saw.
A PhD at twenty-two, Klopfer worked for more than a decade in the Berlin equivalent of Child Guidance and received extensive training in psychoanalytic theory and phenomenology, a philosophical approach focusing on subjective experience. For five years, he hosted a popular weekly radio program that gave listeners child-rearing advice—a pioneering show that broadcast not lectures but Klopfer sitting and discussing listeners’ problems. In 1933, when his eight-year-old son came home from school in Germany and asked, “What is a Jew?”—a boy had been beaten up, and the principal had told little Klopfer it was wrong to help him because the boy was Jewish—Klopfer answered, “I’ll tell you next week.” By then they had left the country.
With his son safe at a boarding school in England, Bruno Klopfer got a Swiss visa sponsored by Carl Jung, which is how he ended up working at the Zurich Psychotechnic Institute, learning the Rorschach test from an assistant named Alice Grabarski so that he could administer it twice a day to Swiss job applicants. In business-friendly Switzerland, the test was being used far more in vocational counseling and industry than by serious psychologists; Klopfer found the work dull. He came to America on July 4, 1934, as a research assistant for the Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas. For all his expertise and experience, his salary was $556 a year, roughly $10,000 in today’s dollars. Finding that people in New York were hungry to learn more about the Rorschach, he saw his chance.
Klopfer, too, had brought Psychodiagnostics and the inkblots with him, and the chair of the Columbia Psychology Department, who had supervised Beck’s dissertation, was interested in the Rorschach. But he was firmly on the side of psychometrics and behaviorism, suspicious of Klopfer’s psychoanalytical and philosophical background, and he said that Klopfer could teach at Columbia only if he first got a letter of support from the more trustworthy Beck or Oberholzer. Unable to rise through official channels, Klopfer turned himself into America’s leading Rorschach expert on his own.
It was an intellectually vibrant time in New York, the city full of scholars and scientists in exile from Nazi Germany who had been taken in by Princeton, Columbia, and the University in Exile at the New School for Social Research. Gatherings like the great neurologist Kurt Goldstein’s informal cultural salons in basement rooms of the Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx, with voluble conversations going on simultaneously in French, German, and Italian, gave Klopfer a hospitable welcome and access to a huge and interdisciplinary range of contacts.
Despite his terrible English, Klopfer taught the Rorschach to interested grad students and staff—seven students two nights a week for six weeks, at first—in whatever space was available, from empty lecture halls to Brooklyn apartments. By 1936 he was teaching three seminars a week; in 1937, he was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Guidance, teaching one seminar a semester and continuing to offer private classes for the non-Columbia students. The first Rorschach journal grew out of the loose affiliation of Klopfer and his students: the Rorschach Research Exchange. Its first issue, in 1936, sixteen mimeographed pages, was funded by fourteen people chipping in three dollars each; within a year it was a respectable journal with a hundred subscribers internationally. A Rorschach Institute soon followed, with membership qualifications and an accreditation process. Beck published work in Klopfer’s journal, but not for long.
Both men saw the Rorschach as an incredibly powerful tool. According to Klopfer, using a metaphor that would recur again and again throughout the test’s history, it “does not reveal a behavior picture, but rather shows—like an X-ray picture—the underlying structure which makes behavior understandable.” Beck synonymously described “a fluoroscope into the psyche”: an “extremely sensitive” and “objective instrument having a potential for penetrating into the whole person.”
Still, they saw very different things when they looked through their instruments. Klopfer, from a European philosophical tradition rather than Beck’s American behaviorist one, took a holistic approach: a person’s answers yielded a “configuration” to be interpreted as a whole, not scores to be added up. For Beck, configurations were secondary at best, objectivity was all. For instance, Beck felt that the decision whether to score a response as good or bad (F+ or F–) must never be based on idiosyncratic personal judgment, no matter how experienced the examiner or group of examiners: “Once the response has been finally judged plus or minus, it must always be scored plus or minus,” irrespective of holistic considerations of anything else the test taker might have said. Klopfer, while he agreed that lists of good and bad responses were needed to judge common answers as F+ or F–, argued that rare and yet “keenly perceived” answers must be categorized as different from bad answers—and that meant judging them individually, because no list could contain every possible response.
Rorschach had been subjective and objective both, a personality as symmetrical as his inkblots, and both men knew it. In Klopfer’s words, Rorschach “combined, to a marked degree, the sound empirical realism of a clinician with the speculative acumen of an intuitive thinker.” In Beck’s: Rorschach as a psychoanalyst understood depth psychology and “knew the value of free association. Fortunately, too, he possessed an experimental bent, appreciated the advantages of objectivity, and was gifted also with creative insight.”
By 1937 the battle lines had been drawn. Klopfer, improvising with eager, inquisiti
ve students, felt free to change the test and develop new techniques based on clinical experience and instinct, not necessarily empirical research. He added a new code for responses that describe the movement of nonhuman objects, for example, even though Rorschach had insisted that M responses were about the subject’s identification with human or humanlike movement. In fact, Klopfer added codes with abandon: while “Rorschach was able to handle the material of his test with the simple M, C, CF, FC, and F(C)” codes, Beck complained, “the Klopfer repertory with M, FM, m, mF, Fm, k, kF, Fk, K, KF, FK, Fc, c, cF, FC′, C′F, C′, F/C, C/F, C, Cn, Cdes, Csym, is bewildering.”
Beck was a traditionalist, firmly committed to his lineage of teachers. He saw himself as “a student trained in the Rorschach-Oberholzer discipline.” Any change to the canonical test would have to be thoroughly grounded in empirical research. He wrote that Klopfer’s concept of nonhuman movement, for example, “does not seem consistent with Rorschach’s, Oberholzer’s, Levy’s, or their close followers’ understanding of the value of M….If this interpretation of M is based in [Klopfer’s] experience, one is naturally interested in the evidence.” Beck was proud that his work showed “little influence deriving from the new idiom that has appeared in recent years, only in America, reporting studies in which the Rorschach inkblot figures were used.” He disdained even to call Klopfer’s studies-using-the-inkblot-figures actual Rorschach research.
The Inkblots Page 20
