The Inkblots

by Damion Searls

  In the end, the psychologists’ recommendations were modest. The child was “in considerable distress,” they wrote. Whoever got custody, “the child’s current state indicated a need for some form of intervention” and both parents should be involved. The report on the mother “stressed that while she might benefit from psychotherapy, this did not signify unfitness, nor did it indicate that she might be a less capable parent than the father.” Despite lawyers repeatedly pressing the psychologists to take a side, there was “no specific recommendation concerning custody” or evidence of either parent being unfit. As a result, their input fell short of what the court had expected, and the judge had to reach his own conclusion. He awarded split custody and ordered the mother to seek therapy for herself and arrange intervention for the child.

  Exner included Hank and Cindy’s case precisely because it wasn’t sensational or earth-shattering. This was what Rorschach findings in legal contexts were supposed to look like. Since the book was Exner’s manual on how to use the Rorschach, that was naturally what it went into detail about, giving all three family members’ full Rorschach transcripts, scores, and interpretations. In the case itself, the psychologists had combined the Rorschach results with other information not published in such detail. Still, the combination of cryptic codes with sweeping judgments of character and psychology could not help but look like repellent mumbo-jumbo to skeptics, especially those less familiar with Exner’s version of the test. To practitioners, it was just another day at the office.

  Like the medical system, the legal system had found the version of the Rorschach test it needed—one supporting an ever more impressive superstructure of codes, scores, and cross-checks. American psychology had made two Faustian bargains: asking to be paid for as a medical service justifiable to insurance companies, which required meeting their standards, and going into the courtroom, which required the psychologist to claim the same kind of impersonal authority as a judge. In theory, psychology didn’t have to be used to answer narrow questions—Sick or healthy? Sane or insane? Guilty or not guilty?—any more than art or philosophy did. It could be open-ended, leading to truths but no answers. But now more than ever, that was how it was used, in contexts pushing for either-or verdicts, results in black and white.

  John Exner’s most important contribution was to sweep away the moving target of multiple Rorschach systems. In so doing, he made it easier to criticize the test, too: a unified Rorschach only sharpened the polarization between skeptics and believers. As the twentieth century drew to a close, the story of the Rorschach would fall apart into the controversies around it. No evidence would be equally accepted on both sides, no instance of applying the test would be any more emblematic than thousands of others, and nothing seemed able to change anybody’s mind.

  In the fall of 1985, a woman named Rose Martelli married Donald Bell; six months later, pregnant, she left him. After their son was born, Bell sued for custody and visitation rights. Rose claimed he had been violent during their marriage, and Rose’s eight-year-old daughter by a previous marriage suddenly claimed to remember that Donald had sexually abused her three years before. But the judge, apparently finding the timing of the accusations suspicious, awarded Donald full parental rights and unsupervised contact. The boy started coming home with unexplained bruises, and Rose eventually called Child Protective Services, claiming physical and sexual abuse but with no decisive evidence. CPS requested that both parents be evaluated by psychologists.

  Donald’s test results came back normal. Rose’s psychologist reported that she “was seriously disturbed and probably lacked genuine concern for her two children” and also that “Rose’s thinking was so impaired that she distorted reality and the actions of other people.” The CPS caseworker told Rose to drop the case and seek therapy herself, and refused to act on her subsequent reports. Eight months later, the boy, now five, said his father had hit him and “poked him in the butt” and asked to be taken to a doctor. The swab from a rape kit tested positive.

  A new review of the case by a psychologist specializing in child abuse turned up numerous pieces of evidence that Rose’s and her daughter’s allegations should have been believed. Donald had a violent record; Rose had a reputation for honesty in her community; all of her “so-called bizarre stories” that he investigated turned out to be “meticulously accurate.” Yet CPS had taken the original psychologist’s report as the last word. In fact, the second psychologist was shocked to realize, Rose had been labeled untrustworthy and emotionally disturbed solely because of one test: the Rorschach.

  The examiner had drawn conclusions from Rose’s Rorschach using Exner scores that had little proven validity, or that commonly overdiagnosed normal test takers, while neglecting other, more positive findings in the test results. Rose had seen “a Thanksgiving turkey already eaten” in one inkblot: this “Food response” had contributed to her evaluation as clingy and dependent. But the examiner might have taken into account that Rose had been given the test on her lunch break without having eaten since breakfast, or that it was December 5, a week after Thanksgiving, when just such a carcass had been sitting in her fridge.

  One of the examiner’s most damning conclusions, that Rose was “self-centered and without empathy for her children,” was due to a single Reflection response (mirrors or seeing reflections), which elevated the Egocentricity Index, indicating narcissism and self-absorption. But what Rose had seen in the inkblots was “a paper snowflake, like you make by folding a piece of paper and cutting it out.” This was not a Reflection response—the examiner had coded it wrong. By the time the reviewing psychologist realized all of this, it was too late. The father had custody.

  With cases like Rose Martelli’s in mind, Robyn Dawes, a former member of the American Psychological Association Ethics Committee, wrote in the late eighties that “the use of Rorschach interpretations in establishing an individual’s legal status and child custody is the single most unethical practice of my colleagues.” Despite the Rorschach being “unreliable and invalid,” in his words, “the plausibility of Rorschach interpretation is so compelling that it is still accepted in court proceedings involving involuntary commitment and child custody, with psychologists who offer such interpretations in these hearings being duly recognized as ‘experts.’ ” Dawes’s 1994 book House of Cards later used the Rorschach as its central example of psychology built on myth rather than science.

  Exner’s reinvention of the Rorschach had not persuaded everyone.

  —

  Meanwhile the inkblots continued to capture the popular imagination. Many young people at the end of the twentieth century would have gotten their first glimpse of Rorschach’s name in Watchmen (1987), the psychological superhero comic book that made it onto Time magazine’s list of the hundred best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. Its noirish antihero, named Rorschach, hid a dark soul behind his inkblot mask. Due to the mask’s special properties, its symmetrical black shapes shifted but never mixed with the white background, symbolizing the black-and-white, no-gray-area moral code that the character took to brutal extremes. The two colors would never come together.

  In 1993, Hillary Clinton too used the inkblot metaphor to evoke irreconcilable extremes: “I’m a Rorschach test,” she told an Esquire reporter, an image that would stay with her for years. (Annotating his classic article in 2016, the original reporter, Walter Shapiro, wrote: “I believe this was the first time Hillary said this oft-repeated line.” And it is repeated still: In an anthology of articles about Clinton’s career published for the 2016 election season, the introduction called Clinton “a Rorschach test of our attitudes—including our unconscious ones”; the collection “won’t answer all the readers’ questions, but at the very least it brings the Rorschach blot into clearer focus.”) In this metaphor, people’s reactions to Hillary defined them, not her; she bore little or no responsibility for which side they were on. This was the Rorschach as divider. Shapiro’s article went on to debunk var
ious myths and show that some interpretations of Hillary were simply false. And yet, he wrote, “She’s right. Hillary Rodham Clinton the real person is largely unknown. We look at her visage on television and magazine covers—and we see what we want to see.”

  Outside of a polarized political context, “we see what we want to see” could sound like a shrug of indifference, and no one welcomed this indifference, even raised it to an art form, more than Andy Warhol. He had started manufacturing images of manufactured consumer products in the sixties, mechanically silkscreening images of Campbell’s Soup cans like ones he had earlier painted, or having carpenters make plywood boxes the same size as supermarket cartons, with other people painting the silkscreened designs of Brillo soap-pad cartons on them. The result was a mass-produced series of objects that looked almost indistinguishable from the real products. “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine,” he famously said. “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

  Beyond coolly undercutting the bombast of Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock, Warhol was denying the inner self altogether. Artists didn’t express anything. Like Rorschach’s blots, Warhol artfully concealed any trace of intentions. In one scholar’s words, “Is the work merely a readymade, or does it communicate something more? Is there intentional significance in these marks on canvas?” Probably no other major artist’s “actual, physical work matter[ed] as little as Andy Warhol’s”—your reactions to a Warhol really did matter more than the Warhol itself.

  The aspiring machine who hired others to make his Brillo boxes, do his silkscreens, and give his artist talks for him returned only once in his late career to making expressive marks of his own with paint on paper. In 1984, Warhol poured paint onto large, sometimes wall-sized white canvases, folded them in half, and ended up with a series of some six dozen symmetrical inkblot paintings. Most used black paint, some were in gold or multiple colors. They were first exhibited as a group in 1996. Every one was called Rorschach.

  Andy Warhol, Rorschach, 1984 Credit 18

  The project started with a mistake: Warhol thought, or claimed he’d thought, “that when you go to places like hospitals they tell you to draw and make Rorschach tests. I wish I’d known there was a set” of standard images, he said, so he could have just copied them. Instead, he made his own blots to see what he’d find. He quickly grew bored by the interpretation part of the process and said he’d rather hire someone to pretend they were him and say what they saw. That way the results would be “a little more interesting,” he deadpanned. “All I would see would be a dog’s face or something like a tree or a bird or a flower. Somebody else could see a lot more.”

  It was a classic Warhol provocation, and the blots looked great—Warhol could more than match Rorschach’s sense of design and “spatial rhythm.” He even admitted it: the Rorschach paintings “had technique too….Throwing paint on, it could just be a blob. So maybe they’re better because I was trying to do them.”

  Warhol brought the inkblots firmly into the artistic mainstream and in so doing transformed their significance. His blots didn’t dance at the edge of interpretability like Rorschach’s; as one critic wrote on the occasion of the 1996 show, “These are abstract paintings without the heavy air of cryptic obscurity and vague profundity that hangs around a lot of abstract art. There’s a democratic, do-it-yourself quality to the Rorschach paintings: you can read whatever you want into them, there are no wrong answers.” Above all, the blots were not psychological—not trying to penetrate into the viewer’s mind, not designed to call forth Movement responses, a “feeling-into” the images. None of that would be, in Warhol’s word, “interesting.” Just look at the surface, they said: here I am.

  In the history of the Rorschach, Warhol marks the point of greatest distance between the test in psychology and the inkblots in art and popular culture. Unlike the scientific and humanistic interests of Hermann Rorschach, or the work of Bruno Klopfer and influential anthropologist Ruth Benedict, or the fifties content analysts and the makers of Rebel Without a Cause, or even Dr. Brokaw’s fictional crisis of faith and Arthur Jensen’s real one, Warhol’s Rorschach and Exner’s Rorschach had practically nothing to do with each other. Warhol had no idea how the real test worked; Exner had entrenched the test in quantitative science rather than pushing for wider relevance to art or the culture at large.

  In literature, too, the Rorschach could be flattened out into pure surface. A surprisingly gripping 1994 book called The Inkblot Record, by experimental poet Dan Farrell, gathered the answers from half a dozen Rorschach textbooks and simply alphabetized them—all the cards, all the test takers, jumbled together into a free-form Coltrane solo of things seen, occasionally letting out cries from the soul:

  …Wings here, head could be here or here. Wings out flying. Wings outstretched, ears, can’t tell which side is facing, a diagrammatic representation. Wire-haired fox terrier, the head is here, the shape and little furry around nose. Wishbone. Wishbone. Wishes never came true, but it was fun to pretend. Wishing I really had a mother, I don’t I never did. Witchy hats. With a large beard, large eyes….

  Answer after answer, stripped of all efforts to get behind them.

  —

  By the time the polarization around the Rorschach came to a head in psychology, the Rorschach meant Exner. By 1989, twice as many psychologists were using the Exner System as were using Klopfer’s or Beck’s; since it was taught in 75 percent of graduate courses on the Rorschach, its dominance only increased over time. And Exner seemed to be turning the Rorschach’s fortunes around. Having slipped to fifth place in the late 1980s, the Rorschach at the end of the twentieth century was solidly in second again: still behind the MMPI, but administered hundreds of thousands of times a year or more in the United States, an estimated six million times a year worldwide.

  In legal settings, too, Exner had prevailed. He and a coauthor published a short 1996 article, “Is the Rorschach Welcome in the Courtroom?,” which surveyed the psychologists on Exner’s mailing list and found that in over four thousand criminal cases, over three thousand custody cases, and close to a thousand personal injury cases across thirty-two states and the District of Columbia their Rorschach testimony had almost never been challenged. Thus, Exner concluded, “Contrary to whatever different opinion may be voiced, the Rorschach is welcome in the courtroom.” While that certainly seemed to raise the big question of whether it should be, the law has real-world standards for what is admissible as evidence in court, and the Rorschach test met them. The adoption of the Daubert standard in 1993—mandating that evidence be “objectively scientific,” not just common practice—led to increased, not decreased, use of Exner in the courts.

  As the APA’s Board of Professional Affairs wrote, honoring Exner with a lifetime achievement award in 1998, he had “almost single-handedly rescued the Rorschach and brought it back to life. The result [was] the resurrection of perhaps the single most powerful psychometric instrument ever envisioned.” Exner was seventy, having devoted his life to the inkblots that had struck him so forcefully back in 1953. His name, according to the citation, had “become synonymous with this test.”

  This was true on both sides of the Rorschach wars.

  Along with Robyn Dawes, a group of naysayers had published a series of articles in the eighties and nineties denouncing Exner’s Rorschach as unscientific. The first peak of this wave came in 1999, only a year after Exner’s award, when Howard Garb, a member of the VA Healthcare System—a stronghold for psychological testing since the forties—called for a moratorium on the use of the Rorschach in both clinical and forensic settings until the validity of its scores was established. His article opened with the rhetoric that dominated discussion of the test, and of practically everything else: “Trying to decide whether the Rorschach is valid is like looking at a Rorschach Inkblot. The results from research are ambiguous just as R
orschach Inkblots are ambiguous. Different people look at the research and see different things.”

  The second peak came in 2003, when the four most vocal critics of the test, including Garb, published a book that collected in one place all the attacks on Exner’s reunified Rorschach. The book’s lead author was the psychologist who had reexamined Rose Martelli’s Rorschach test, James M. Wood, and What’s Wrong with the Rorschach? Science Confronts the Controversial Inkblot Test opened with Rose’s case.

  The book presented the most thorough history of the Rorschach yet written, wrapped in a sensationalist package that started with the title. Three of the four coauthors published an article that same year called “What’s Right with the Rorschach?” concluding that “the virtues of the Rorschach are modest but genuine,” but that’s not how the book was presented. A chapter on the future of the test was called “Still Waiting for the Messiah.” An account of Hermann Rorschach’s strengths and weaknesses as a scientist appeared in a section called “Just Another Kind of Horoscope?” even though the section’s own answer to that question was apparently “No”: Rorschach was criticized for various failings but praised as having been right about the connection between personality and perception, and ahead of his time in insisting on group studies and quantitative validation.

  It wasn’t all sensationalism, though. The book pulled together decades of criticism from throughout the test’s history, reframing earlier figures like Arthur Jensen not as isolated voices but as neglected champions of scientific objectivity. Wood also reviewed the new wave of research critical of Exner’s system, such as fourteen studies from the 1990s that attempted to replicate Exner’s findings about his Depression Index score. Rose Martelli had been found to have a high one of those, too. But eleven of these studies, according to Wood, found no significant relationship between the score and diagnoses of depression, with two other studies reporting mixed results.