Before long, Beck and Klopfer were literally not on speaking terms, and that was how it remained between America’s two most prominent Rorschachers. Students at Klopfer’s workshops who had studied with Beck were eyed with suspicion by their partisan classmates. In the summer of 1954, a promising graduate student named John Exner arrived in Chicago to work as Beck’s assistant, soon becoming good friends with Beck and his wife. When he showed up at Beck’s house one day, innocently carrying a copy of Klopfer’s book on the Rorschach, Beck asked, suddenly cold: “What’s that? Where did you get that book?”
“At the library,” Exner nervously replied.
“Our library?” Beck said, as though the University of Chicago were his territory, off limits to the interloper.
In truth neither Klopfer nor Beck was as narrow or rigid as the roles they came to play representing the two contrasting approaches to the inkblots. Klopfer co-wrote his first book with a hard science psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas Kelley, and tempered his position in later years, though never to the point of being able to reconcile with his rival. Beck, for his part, would often “awe those around him” with brilliant interpretations going beyond the available data: colleagues recalled how “the phenomenologist, lurking somewhere beneath his staunch empiricist exterior, would ‘out’ and reveal the full expertise of the brilliant clinician.” Still, the feud raged.
Every science has its feuds and backbiting, but the history of the Rorschach test has been unusually plagued by controversy, with the “squabbles,” to use Jung’s word from Psychological Types, unusually hostile. On the one side, objective scientists repelled by charismatic charlatans; on the other, subtle explorers of the mind unwilling to kneel at the altar of standardization. The test’s balance—between conscious problem solving and unconscious reactions, between structure and freedom, subjectivity and objectivity—made it especially easy to see it from only one side, rejecting the other perspective.
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The Klopfer-Beck feud drowned out the voices of more moderate figures, most notably Marguerite Hertz (1899–1992). Hertz had first been shown the inkblots by her Cleveland friend Sam Beck and had trained with David Levy in 1930. Her 1932 dissertation on questions of standardization was the second on the Rorschach, after Beck’s, and in 1934 she published her first article, likewise using a psychometric perspective: “The Reliability of the Rorschach Ink-Blot Test.” She also joined Klopfer’s group in 1936.
While closer to Beck in substance, Hertz was less of an originalist in temperament, more willing than he to criticize or add to the master’s system. One of her innovations was a trial blot, shown to subjects with encouraging remarks before the test proper to talk them through what they were about to do. And she was critical of both sides when necessary; she has since been called the conscience of the early Rorschach pioneers. Her first article in Klopfer’s Rorschach Research Exchange argued that a Detail response had to be judged “normal” through empirical statistics, against Klopfer’s “qualitative approach” of deciding the question as he saw fit. While she championed standardization, though, she cautioned Beck and his supporters that it must never be “rigid” or “inflexible.” Elsewhere she praised Klopfer for being “far more flexible than many of his disciples,” who had an “almost faddish devotion” to the Klopfer System and Klopfer himself.
Her most dramatic effort to reconcile the two sides came in 1939. Whether you liked or disliked the subjectivity involved in interpreting a Rorschach test, she pointed out, the test was worthless if different scorers and interpreters couldn’t reliably reach more or less the same results, ones more or less consistent with findings from other tests or evaluations. Yet “because the Rorschach method is peculiarly different from most psychological tests,” she wrote, it was hard to test its reliability in standard ways. You couldn’t compare it against other series of inkblots, because there’s no other series of blots that works. You couldn’t use a split-half method, because the results from the first five cards and results from the last five cards are meaningless in isolation. If you retested someone after a while, their psychology might have changed, so differing results would not necessarily indicate a flawed test. How could the test be tested?
Inspired by Rorschach’s own blind diagnoses, Hertz staged the first multiple blind-interpretation with the Rorschach: submitting the same test protocol for interpretation by Klopfer, Beck, and herself. The test passed the test: all three analyses agreed with each other and with the clinical conclusions of the patient’s doctor, offering “the same personality picture” of the patient’s intelligence, cognitive style, influence of emotions, conflicts, neuroses. There were no substantive differences, only slightly different emphases. Hertz called it “a remarkable extent of agreement.” The battle royale was a win-win-win.
Hertz spent years as a researcher for the Brush Foundation at Western Reserve University (now Case Western), collecting data for an enormous normative study—more than three thousand Rorschach protocols from a variety of groups: children, adolescents, different races, healthy, pathological, superior, delinquent. By the end of the thirties, she had nearly finished her manuscript, a comprehensive textbook that would likely have changed the history of the Rorschach in America had she published it. But the Brush Foundation project was canceled, and then Hertz got a phone call: “One day it was decided to dispose of the material which was no longer in use and which the authorities felt was worthless. I was called and told that I may have my material. I went over at once with graduate students and a truck, but to my dismay, I learned that my material had already been burned ‘by mistake.’ It had been ‘confused’ with everything else being discarded. All the Rorschach records, all the psychological data, all the worksheets, plus my manuscript went up in smoke.” The collection of data was unreproducible, the loss “irreparable,” and Hertz was “unwilling to write a book without relating what I say to my own research.” With that disaster, the leading moderate voice on the Rorschach—closest in tone and spirit to Rorschach’s own—was lost, or at least subordinated to Klopfer’s and Beck’s.
Hertz wrote dozens of important articles in the years to come but never collected them into a book—apparently willing to let Klopfer take the lead after he published his own textbook in 1942, especially since her early psychometric emphasis was increasingly giving way to an approach closer to his. For half a century, she regularly wrote overview articles evaluating the state of the field as a whole, synthesizing or criticizing others rather than staking her own claims. Much of her early work focused on children and adolescents, without the emphasis on medical diagnosis that marked the early decades of the test in America outside of Chicago. It no doubt mattered that she was a woman, although as always it is hard to say precisely how the gender difference played out: directly or indirectly, through her choice of more “feminized” topics of study, through her willingness not to publish. In any case, while her approach to Rorschach administration and interpretation was importantly different from both Beck’s and Klopfer’s, she never presented her methodology as an integrated system of its own.
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Klopfer’s intuitive interpretations and generally subjective approach tended to draw stronger reactions than Beck’s emphasis on objectivity. At worst, Beck was dry and rigid, while Klopfer, throughout his career, would be hailed as a magician and reviled as a fraud. But no one, then or later, disputed that Klopfer’s organizational brio was indispensable for the rise of the Rorschach.
By 1940, Klopfer was teaching three courses at Columbia’s Teachers College and another at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, supervising eight graduate students at Columbia and New York University, and giving workshops and seminars from San Francisco, Berkeley, and Los Angeles to Denver, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. Branches in Texas, Maine, Wisconsin, and Canada, Australia, England, and South America followed within a year. Hertz, too, had been teaching two graduate courses a year since 1937, along with a six-month administration and scoring course; Beck
was busy in Chicago; even Emil Oberholzer, who had immigrated to New York in 1938, gave a series of lectures for the New York Psychoanalytic Society in 1938–39. Interested parties could get beginning or advanced training across the country.
At Sarah Lawrence, an elite women’s college near New York with flexible instruction tailored to each student, the staff and faculty in 1937 were dissatisfied with what they could learn about their students from “observations and the general run of objective tests.” So a psychologist named Ruth Munroe turned to the Rorschach. Klopfer analyzed six protocols from freshmen and gave the profiles, without names, to the students’ teacher, who could identify every student correctly; other blind analyses and “various other checking devices” were equally convincing.
Satisfied that the test worked, Munroe and her Sarah Lawrence colleagues were soon “so busy using it that the projected full scientific analysis has been delayed.” It seemed better than anything else they had, and if the teachers and advisers, with so much detailed personal information about every student, confirmed the test results and felt that the test in turn “confirmed and focused” what they already suspected, what else could they want? The Rorschach was “not infallible,” Munroe wrote. “Neither are teacher judgments. The general correspondence is sufficiently close, however, so that we feel justified in accepting the Rorschach as a useful tool in educational planning. It is scarcely necessary to mention the qualification that we never use the test as the sole or even the major criterion of judgment in any important decision about a student.” Within three years Munroe’s team had Rorschach-tested over a hundred students, as well as sixteen teachers, to explore the possibility of predicting student-teacher rapport.
Rorschach results were soon being used to tailor teaching approaches to the needs of each student or to suggest whether a struggling student had “the resources from which improvement may be expected.” One student, a lawyer’s daughter, had narrow interests, extraordinarily stubborn ideas, and fierce resistance to anything new. When it was unclear whether these were “a superficial adolescent reaction” to be worked on further or instead “a deep-seated compulsion” unlikely to change, her rigid and intellectually undistinguished Rorschach indicated the latter. “It is difficult to know how we can best help this girl,” but letting her define her own areas of study would not be the right approach. Another student, nervous and overly conscientious, revealed an original and vigorous imagination on her Rorschach. Changing her tightly structured program to one that gave her greater freedom to pursue her own interests brought excellent results.
The inkblots could also catch problems early. One freshman seemed fine, with her “lively manner,” “a certain freshness and humor,” “good common sense and conventionality,” and “thoroughly ‘collegiate’ ” clothes and appearance. Her weak academic performance was largely due, teachers thought, “to a somewhat excessive social life”: she “made the rounds of the men’s colleges with great pleasure apparently,” and a recent quarrel “with the man at Princeton” had only slightly curtailed “the range of her prom trotting.”
Her Rorschach, though, which she took as part of a control group and not because of any particular suspicions about her, showed her to be “the most strikingly disturbed” student in the class: “For some reason or other she is scared to death.” She was extremely defensive, with signs of hostility and resentment (one of her responses was “People spitting at each other, sticking their tongues out or something”) and severe emotional blocking that almost totally suppressed the intellectual capacities evident in her few lively and perceptive responses. A subsequent meeting with all her teachers and advisers confirmed what her performance on the test suggested: she was doing barely adequate work in all her classes, showing interest at first but staying on a superficial level before suddenly becoming disengaged or dismissive. She had once gone after her sister with a knife, “but of course was over that now.” She told her adviser she had felt “suicidal all day,” but then passed it off as a joke.
The problems were there, but no one had noticed them until the inkblots. Starting in 1940, the Rorschach was given to every entering student at Sarah Lawrence, with the results scanned quickly for striking problems, kept on file in case questions about the student arose later, and used as “a permanent reservoir for research material.”
Within barely a dozen years of its arrival in America, the Rorschach was being taught, used, and studied furiously across the country. Scores were being refined and redefined, data collected and analyzed, techniques improved and invented, results analyzed blind and correlated with other tests and every sociocultural factor imaginable. Along with asking what about the test made it so popular, it makes sense to ask what made the country so receptive. America was in another “test-hungry time,” as Rorschach had written of Switzerland in 1921, but there was more. Americans increasingly thought of themselves as having something special inside that could not be accessed with any standard tests, and the Rorschach would prove uniquely able to grasp it.
What you do—in fact, everything you do—expresses who you are. Your actions reveal not so much the content of your character as your personality: not conformity to recognized moral virtues, but how you stand out by being unique and special.
These familiar ideas were the product of a shift in early twentieth-century America from a culture of character to a culture of personality. “Character,” an ideal of serving a higher moral and social order, was regularly invoked around the turn of the twentieth century alongside citizenship, duty, democracy, work, building, golden deeds, outdoor life, conquest, honor, reputation, morals, manners, integrity, and above all manhood. “Personality,” in contrast, was invoked in the following decades together with words like fascinating, stunning, attractive, magnetic, glowing, masterful, creative, dominant, forceful—not nouns but adjectives, not specific kinds of behavior but hype for making an impact.
These new terms of praise were amoral: someone’s character was good or bad, but a personality was appealing or unappealing. If anything, bad was better—a thrilling rebel beat an upstanding drip any day. The charm and charisma that compelled people to like you came to be seen as mattering more than integrity or honorable deeds that might earn their respect; poise took precedence over virtue, seeming sincere over being sincere. Who cared what you were like on the inside if you were too dull to be noticed in the faceless crowd at all?
The cultural shift from character to personality can be tracked in self-help books, sermons, education, advertising, politics, fiction—anything that offered an ideal of how to live. Dr. Orison Swett Marden, the Dr. Phil of his day, ended his 1899 book Character: The Greatest Thing in the World with a quote from US president James Garfield: “I must succeed in making myself a man.” By 1921, when he came to write Masterful Personality, Marden had changed with the times: “Our success in life depends upon what others think of us.” Movie stars were part of the same shift: studios at first tended to conceal the identities of actors and actresses, but around 1910 the star was born, and his or her personality became the movie’s main selling point. Douglas Fairbanks, the first such movie celebrity, was described this way in 1907: “He’s not good looking. But he has worlds of personality.” Or this slogan from one of cinema’s greatest, Katharine Hepburn: “Show me an actress who isn’t a personality and you’ll show me a woman who isn’t a star.” The archetype of the jazzy new age wasn’t Gatsby the Good Person, but Gatsby the incomparably Great, and how he made his money mattered infinitely less than his indescribable qualities, his sparkle, his beautiful shirts.
Since you have some control over how you come across, you can shape your destiny by improving your self-presentation—the classic American promise took on this form in the early twentieth century, echoed endlessly by style magazines and business gurus in the decades since. The downside of endless opportunities to make a masterful impression, of course, was the infinite risk of making a bad one. In a world of constant social monitoring and comparison,
the demands of self-marketing never stopped: absolutely anything might reveal to watchful, judging eyes more about you than you might even know.
One classic study, Roland Marchand’s Advertising the American Dream, reprints a truly terrifying array of early-twentieth-century ads proclaiming that your bad breath, careless shave, unfortunate clothes, or droopy socks would be noticed, dooming your chances at romance, success, and a decent life. “critical eyes are sizing you up right now,” intoned the voice of Williams shaving cream. Only because she owned a Dr. West toothbrush could one woman pass “The Smile Test” when she fell off a toboggan and a handsome stranger helped her to her feet. Ads of an earlier generation had tended to actually describe their products rather than offering this combination of promise and threat.
But even if the new ads exaggerated a little, they reflected social realities. Superficial things “were more significant in a mobile, urban, impersonal society” than in an earlier era of more stable relationships, in Marchand’s words. Especially in love and business, to have a masterful personality meant you had to “be yourself,” but that also meant smiling the right smile and wearing the right sock garters. Without such external markers, you were out of luck.
Given the high stakes, the glamour and flair of “personality” paradoxically came to be essential: style was substance, how you came across was who you were. “As late as 1915,” in the words of one leading anthropologist, “the very word still carried overtones chiefly of piquancy, unpredictability, intellectual daring: a man’s personality was much like a woman’s ‘it’ ”—the sex appeal that made her, in the cliché of the time, an “It Girl.” By the 1930s, though, once Freud had come to prominence, Americans had seized upon the idea that some ineffable inner force dominated our lives, and they equated that force with personality. Jung’s “psychological types,” which had described something more like character than style, were reimagined in America as “personality types,” starting with the work of Myers and Briggs in the 1920s. And while the seething energy of the Freudian unconscious was hopelessly chaotic, personality was understood as having a “structure,” something that could be analyzed, categorized, grappled with. If you described that inner force as “personality,” there was more you could say about it.
The Inkblots Page 21
