This evolving sense of self was what the Rorschach test tapped into, and it in turn redefined the test. A 1939 essay called “Projective Methods for the Study of Personality,” by Lawrence Frank, was nothing less than a new vision of the individual’s place in the world, redefining psychology for the twentieth century and putting the Rorschach, as a test of “personality,” right at the center of it.
Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) has been called “the Johnny Appleseed of the social sciences” for his fruitful work as a writer, lecturer, mentor, and executive in a series of leadership posts in philanthropic foundations from the twenties through the forties. Margaret Mead wrote in an obituary that he “more or less invented the social sciences” and was “one of the two or three men” who used foundations “the way the Lord meant them to be used.” His greatest contribution was to promote research on childhood development and spread the results in nursery and elementary schools and treatment settings; his efforts shaped the fields of developmental child psychology, early childhood education, and pediatrics for decades to come.
In a 1939 essay, Frank explained personality in the broadest possible terms, as the way we give meaning to life. “The personality process,” he wrote, “might be regarded as a sort of rubber stamp which the individual imposes upon every situation.” The person “necessarily ignores or subordinates many aspects of the situation that for him are irrelevant and meaningless and selectively reacts to those aspects that are personally significant.” We shape our world, which means we are not passive creatures, receiving and responding to stimuli or facts in the outside world. In Frank’s view, there are no facts, no outside world, no external stimuli at all except insofar as a person “selectively constitutes them and responds to them.” It was an idea with shades of Nikolai Kulbin, the Futurist whom Rorschach had heard in Russia: “The self does not know anything except its own feelings, and while projecting these feelings it creates its own world.”
Such subjectivity posed a problem for the scientist. There was nothing replicable, no control experiments, only the unique interaction that takes place whenever “a person perceives, and imputes to what he perceives, the meaning which he himself projects upon whatever he perceives, then responds in some manner.” Everything a person did was significant, but it needed to be interpreted, not simply tabulated. Standardized tests wouldn’t work. The scientist needed a way to measure how a subject’s personality organized his or her experience.
Lawrence Frank had a solution, and a new name for it: “projective methods.” To Frank these were not “tests,” though they were sometimes referred to as such. Instead, projective methods presented a person with something open-ended, something that meant “not what the experimenter has arbitrarily decided it should mean (as in most psychological experiments using standardized stimuli in order to be ‘objective’), but rather whatever it must mean to the personality who gives it, or imposes upon it, his private, idiosyncratic meaning and organization.” Subjects would then react in a way that expressed their personality. Rather than giving an “objectively” right or wrong answer, a subject would “project” his or her personality out into the world for the experimenter to see.
Frank’s ultimate projective method was the Rorschach.
Other such methods for eliciting the personality already existed in 1939: Frank mentioned play therapy and art therapy, unfinished sentences and uncaptioned pictures, the Cloud Picture method, and more. The clear runner-up was the Thematic Apperception Test, or TAT, developed by two followers of Jung’s at Harvard in the 1930s. In the TAT, subjects are shown pictures—a boy looking at a violin on a table, or a fully dressed man holding his arm over his eyes with a naked woman lying in bed behind him—and asked to come up with a “dramatic story” to explain the scene. But dramatic stories did not provide fixed data to measure and score, like the crucial formal features of Movement and Color, Whole and Detail, on standardized inkblots. TAT results could only be interpreted impressionistically. To psychologists looking for an objective way to measure personality, there was nothing like the Rorschach.
Seventeen years after Hermann Rorschach’s death, his inkblots were reframed as the ultimate projective method and as a new paradigm of modern personality, both in psychology and in the culture at large. The Rorschach and our idea of who we are coalesced around a single symbolic situation, something like this: The world is a dark, chaotic place. It has only the meaning we give it. But do I perceive the shape of things or create that shape? Do I find a wolf in the inkblot or put one there? (Do I find Mr. Right in a handsome stranger or imagine him there?) I, too, am a dark, chaotic place, roiled by unconscious forces, and others are doing to me just what I am doing to them. Like the CRITICAL EYES SIZING YOU UP RIGHT NOW of the shaving cream ad, everyone is sizing me up, uncovering my secrets. Scientists, advertisers, handsome strangers, the inkblots themselves, are peering into me just as much as I am peering into them. (I see a wolf in the blot; the blot sees sanity or insanity in me.)
The Rorschach test, as reimagined in 1939 as a projective method, assumed that we have a creative individual self that shapes how we see, then offered a technique for uncovering and measuring that self, and a beautiful visual symbol for it.
Rorschach had not described his own test in these terms, at least not explicitly. He did not call the inkblot test a “projective method,” and in fact he rarely mentioned “projection,” a concept he understood in the narrower, Freudian sense of attributing something unacceptable about ourselves to other people (an angry person thinks everyone is angry at her; a repressed homosexual denies his own urges and hates what he sees as signs of gayness in others).
Yet Frank’s new understanding of the test was true to what underlay Rorschach’s ideas. Projection in Frank’s sense was ultimately another version of empathy, putting ourselves into the world before responding to what we find there. The Movement response and Frank’s idea of projection rested on the same shifts back and forth between the self and the outside world.
After 1939, both Klopfer’s and Beck’s camps would cast the inkblot test as a “projective method for the study of personality” in Frank’s sense. If the Rorschach was an X-ray, the hidden but all-important personality was the invisible skeleton people wanted to see, and projection was what made it visible.
The broader implications of Frank’s theory were there in Rorschach, too. Frank pointed out that our personality is not chosen from an infinite menu of options: we exist in a social context. “Reality” is a more or less agreed-upon public world that every individual member of a particular society has to accept and interpret within a permitted range of deviation, or else risk being excluded and considered sick. Different societies have different realities—what’s crazy in one is not necessarily crazy in another. Frank’s position was as relativist as Jung’s: cultures, and individuals within a culture, see things their own way.
Psychology, with its new emphasis on personality differences rather than universals of human character, was crossing over into anthropology, the study of cultural differences. This was the move that Rorschach had hoped to but not lived to make himself, with his sect studies and the cross-cultural inkblot experiments he had planned.
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Anthropology, too, was just reaching a mass American audience in its own right. Prior to 1920, it was a relatively dry pursuit: mostly descriptive and historical catalogs of artifacts and kinship structures, however exotic the subject matter might be. Anthropologists studied social institutions and entire populations, with specific people seen merely as “carriers” of the culture. The 1928 index to the first forty volumes of American Anthropologist contained zero mentions of the word “personality.” Insofar as any psychological approach was relevant to this early anthropology, it was behaviorism, which denied universal instincts and insisted that every culture was acquired, every behavior the result of social conditioning.
Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, worked with particular people as individuals, not as representativ
es of a culture. Analysts could more or less ignore issues of cultural difference as long as their patients were from relatively similar social and cultural backgrounds. As psychoanalysis spread to other cultures, however, it became clear that psychological profiles were actually culturally determined. Understanding the personality, then, required seeing the individual against the background of what was fostered or downplayed by his or her culture.
The two fields came to realize that they shared common ground: anthropologists had been unwittingly collecting information about people’s psychologies all along, and psychologists about people’s cultures. In a way, psychoanalysis was anthropology writ small: life histories taken from individual patients. There had been forerunners of the convergence—James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) was basically psychology-oriented anthropology; William Stern, in Germany, had proposed in 1900 that individual, racial, and cultural differences should be studied by “differential psychology,” in effect anthropology. As Freud gained acceptance, the pieces started to fit together. Anthropologists might take down Freud for falsely inflating Viennese-style child rearing into “natural” and “universal” family patterns, but at the same time many realized that what formed this Viennese psychology, or any other specific psychology, were precisely the social patterns they were studying.
By the 1930s, the dominant trend in anthropology was “psychological anthropology” or “Culture and Personality studies,” spearheaded by figures such as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Edward Sapir. To Boas, the so-called father of American anthropology, one of the field’s central problems “was the relation between the objective world and man’s subjective world as it had taken form in different cultures.” It was Boas who had brought Bruno Klopfer to America as his research assistant—a tight network of personal connections underlay developments across the social sciences.
Cultural relativism, a core principle in the Culture and Personality approach, was anthropology’s version of Frank’s and Jung’s findings in psychology: we have to see each culture in its own terms, not judge it according to the standards of another. And this was the version of anthropology that, in the thirties, reached as wide an audience as Freud. Ruth Benedict recast Jung in an American context (“Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest,” 1930), and her bestselling 1934 Patterns of Culture told a generation that values are relative and that culture is “personality writ large.” Just as psychology was taking an anthropological turn, anthropology was taking a psychological turn, both converging on the study of personality.
The Rorschach test held out the same promise in both fields: of being a powerful new key to the individual. The test’s origins in psychiatric diagnosis had created a bias toward using it to detect mental illness, but its use in anthropology, to explore value-neutral cultural differences, increasingly detached the test from a focus on pathology. Much as Hermann Rorschach had broadened out from diagnosing patients to uncovering personalities, anthropologists now carried the inkblots out of the psychiatrist’s office and around the world to investigate all the different ways of being human.
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In 1933 and 1934, two of Eugen Bleuler’s sons were in Morocco. Manfred Bleuler had followed in his father’s footsteps and become a psychiatrist; as a resident at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital in 1927–28, he had been the second person to bring the Rorschach to America. Richard Bleuler was an agronomist, but he too remembered the inkblots his father had shown him in 1921. Together they showed the blots to twenty-nine rural Moroccan farmers, in an effort to “demonstrate that the Rorschach Test is applicable beyond the limits of European civilization.”
The Bleulers’ 1935 essay, despite its sometimes cringe-worthy tone (“For the European who lives among the natives of Morocco, there is something strange and mysterious about those human figures who, clad in their loose gowns flapping in the wind, trot indefatigably on donkeys or camels, or trudge on foot…”), ultimately makes the point that different cultures are different, and that these differences create both misunderstanding and fascination. A sense of “something strange and mysterious” about the Moroccans oscillated with the Bleulers’ “sudden feeling of warm understanding.” They quoted Lawrence of Arabia:
In his book Revolt in the Desert, T. E. Lawrence writes that in the character of the Arabs there are “heights and depths beyond our reach, though not beyond our sight….” Nations perceive the differences in their mental make-up, but do not comprehend them. The observed but incomprehensible differences in the character of the nations are a fascinating riddle that attracts people again and again, drives individuals and nations out of their fatherland, urges them to make friends, or drives them to hatred and war.
It was possible to see without comprehending, to honor differences that one could observe if not quite understand. In any case, the differences were real.
When the Bleulers gave Moroccans the Rorschach test, the responses were in line with those from Europeans, with two exceptions. There were many more Small Detail responses—seeing nearly invisible toothlike projections on either side of a blot as two encampments of enemy riflemen, for instance—and a tendency to give interpretations that incorporated different parts of the card without connecting them. A European might see a head and a leg on each side of a card and respond “two waiters,” mentally joining the parts together into whole bodies; a Moroccan would more likely see the details as a “battlefield” or “cemetery,” a heap of unconnected heads and legs (see this page).
The Bleulers emphasized that these were perfectly reasonable responses and explained them with reference to digressive Arab literature like the Thousand and One Nights, fragmented and detailed mosaics, and other cultural preferences, in contrast to what they called the European predilection for broad generalizations, the “general air of order and tidiness” that Europeans value, and so on. They cited more concrete cultural differences, too, for instance that the Moroccans were much less used to looking at photographs or other pictures than Europeans were and had not internalized the conventions of such pictures. Where a European would tend to assume that every object in a picture is the same scale but at varying distances, with the bigger objects being foregrounded in importance too, Moroccan interpretations often placed differently scaled shapes side by side (a woman holding a jackal’s leg as big as she is) or read significance into tiny details.
The Bleulers’ goal was to “gauge the character of a foreign people,” not to judge or rank it. Getting hung up on extremely small details in the inkblots might imply schizophrenia in a European, but it clearly didn’t in the Moroccans. The Bleulers insisted that the test showed no mental inferiority in the Moroccans and also that it was not fine-grained enough to capture everything important about cultural difference. They argued that it was crucial to know the local language and culture, and they called for empathy (Einfühlung): the experimenter must “not allow himself to be guided merely by a stereotype classification of responses, but should rather ‘feel himself into’ every single one”—easier said than done, of course, but often not even said. Rorschach had tried to judge whether a test taker was feeling movement in the image; the Bleulers made explicit that the test giver had to feel-into the test taker as well.
In 1938, thirty-four-year-old Cora Du Bois arrived with her own Rorschach cards on the volcanic island of Alor in the Netherlands East Indies, east of Bali and just north of Timor. Some fifty miles long by thirty miles wide, the island took five days to cross, through a rugged terrain of nearly vertical cliffs and steep ravines with little arable land for corn and rice, cassava in the dry season. The population of seventy thousand, in communities relatively isolated from each other by the forbidding landscape, spoke eight different languages and countless dialects. After several trips into the interior on horseback and lengthy negotiations with the raja of Alor, Du Bois decided where she would go: the village of Atimelang, with six hundred people in a one-mile radius.
She brought with her two fundamental assumpti
ons: that cultural differences are significant and that people are all essentially the same. We all need to eat, she wrote, and some of us satisfy this need with toast and coffee at eight, salad and dessert at midday, and a balanced three-course meal at seven, others with two handfuls of boiled corn and greens after sunrise, a calabash full of rice and meat in the late afternoon, and snacks throughout the day. These are equally reasonable responses to our human needs: everyone shares “basic similarities” and also adapts to the “repeated and standardized experiences, relationships, and values which occur in many contexts and to which most individuals are exposed” in a given culture. The interplay between the cultural setting and the basic makeup of our bodies and brains results in a “culturally determined personality structuring,” which most people in a culture share, but not everyone, and not entirely.
What had sent Du Bois to far-flung Atimelang was not “an exercise in the esoteric” but the quest to understand what makes us who we are: “In its simplest form the question is: Why is an American different from an Alorese? That they are different is a common sense conclusion, but explanations, from the climatic to the racial, have proved lamentably inadequate in the past.” More adequate answers would come from a nuanced approach, attuned to the interplay between cultural institutions and psychological character.
The Inkblots Page 22
