The Inkblots

by Damion Searls

  Here is how Rorschach made the same point in Psychodiagnostics, quoting his teacher Eugen Bleuler: “In perception, there are three processes: sensation, memory, and association.” Bleuler’s “associationist” theories are inadequate in various ways, as Rorschach himself came to recognize, but the basic fact remains: seeing is a combination of (1) visually registering an object; (2) recognizing the object, that is, identifying it as something by comparing it to known things; and (3) integrating what we see into our attitudes about these things and our worldview in general. This is not a three-step sequence but three inextricable parts of the same act. You don’t first see a tree or a face or an ad, and then process it, and only then react: it happens all together.

  That means it is possible to see impulsively, dreamily, hesitantly—not just see first and then act impulsively, dreamily, hesitantly. A psychologist can watch you seeing anxiously, not just watch you fidgeting anxiously or speaking anxiously. This is why it makes sense to call the act of seeing an inkblot a performance. It may seem obvious that perception happens on the inside, private and inaccessible, with the “performance” on the test coming after the act of seeing. Rorschach argued otherwise.

  As he put it in a 1921 lecture to Swiss schoolteachers:

  When we look at a landscape painting, we feel a cluster of sensations that trigger processes of association in us. These processes call up memory images that then let us perceive the picture, both as a picture and as a landscape.

  If it’s a picture of a landscape we know, we say: We recognize the image. If we don’t know the landscape, we can then interpret it (or fail to interpret it) as the moors, a lakeshore, the Jura Valley, etc. Recognizing, interpreting, determining—all are kinds of perception that differ only in the amount of secondary associative work they involve.

  In other words, every perception combines “the sensations coming in with the memory traces inside us that these sensations summon up,” but in everyday life this “inner matching” happens automatically and unnoticed. Interpretation, Rorschach explained to his audience, is simply effortful perception, “where we notice and perceive the matching as it happens.” We feel ourselves piecing together clues about that unknown landscape and arriving at an answer that feels like a more or less subjective interpretation. The inkblot is merely the case of the unfamiliar landscape taken to an extreme. But even then, interpreting the blot doesn’t come after perceiving it. You don’t interpret what you’ve seen, you interpret while you see.

  Perception is not only a psychological process, it is also—almost always—a cultural one. We see through our personal and cultural “lens,” according to the habits of a lifetime shaped by a particular culture, as the Culture and Personality anthropologists knew. One culture’s trackless wilderness is full of detailed and meaningful information, specific plants and animals, for members of another culture; some people notice a friend’s haircut, others don’t; more than beauty is in the eye of the beholder. An enormous advantage of the Rorschach test is that it largely gets around these lenses—as Manfred Bleuler put it, it lets us strip off “the veils of convention.”

  Ernest Schachtel pointed out more than half a century ago that when we are asked to say what an inkblot might be, we are not in any context where we might reasonably expect some things to loom into view and not others—a dim living room, a foggy road, peering into an aquarium. As a result, interpreting the blot requires more of our active, organizing perception than we usually bring to bear; we are forced to dig through a fuller range of our experience and imagination for ideas about it. At the same time, a wolf in the blot is not a threat, unlike a wolf in a shadowy night, so whether we find it or not doesn’t matter. Sane test takers know that the blot, unlike everything we physically come across in the course of our lives, is not anything “real” at all, other than a real printed card. The stakes are low—what we see has no immediate practical consequences. Our vision has room to relax and roam free, as much room as we are willing to give it.

  This helps explain why the question Rorschach asked in the test is so crucial. If we’re asked, “How does this make you feel?” or “Tell me a story about this scene,” that task doesn’t test our perception. The image on the TAT showing a boy with a violin is meant to look like a boy with a violin, whatever story we tell about him. We can free-associate thoughts or feelings from inkblots, but for that purpose they are no better than clouds, stains, carpets, or anything at all; Rorschach himself thought the inkblots were not especially well suited to free association. Being asked “What do you see?” or “What might this be?,” though, gets at how we process the world on the most basic level—and in doing so calls upon our whole personality and range of experience.

  To be free, for once, to perceive-as-such without any clues or guidelines—to see without the constraining filters of rigid conventionality—can be a powerful experience. Dr. Brokaw, offering this experience to bus riders with his psychedelic shirt, may have been onto something. Actual psychedelic drugs do not stimulate or overstimulate the visual parts of the brain, as one might expect; instead they suppress or shut down the “management layer” of mental functioning: the part of the brain keeping everything else separate—for example, keeping visual centers isolated from emotional centers. On such a drug, your perception is freed of management, filters and guidelines, “veils of convention.” In the quote from William Blake that Aldous Huxley and Jim Morrison made famous, “The doors of perception are cleansed”—like the “windows” through which the abundance of the world flows in, in Rorschach’s favorite line from Gottfried Keller’s poem. Looking at a Rorschach blot is not as powerful an experience as taking a blot of acid, obviously, but they operate in analogous ways.

  Perception is not only visual: “What might this be?” and “What do you see?” are not precisely the same question. But it was more than just personal preference, or technological limitations, that led Rorschach to make inkblots rather than an audio Rorschach test, or cypress knees, or smell-o-blots. Vision is the sense that both operates at a distance, unlike touch and taste, and can be focused and directed, unlike hearing and smell. We can pay attention to certain noises or odors, or try to ignore them, but we can’t blink our ears or aim our nose: the eye is far more active, under far more control. Seeing is our best perceptual tool—our foremost way to engage with the world.

  During the heyday of Freudianism, people thought that the unconscious was all-important and that a method to project the unconscious would reveal the true personality. Part of the reason there is so much anger about the Rorschach’s use in real-world situations—the father in the shaken-baby case outraged that he’s “being asked to look at abstract art”—is that people still widely think of it as a way to generate “projections.” A test of seeing does far more, though. It reveals a person’s grasp on reality, cognitive functioning, susceptibility to emotions. It shows how she approaches a task and gives her a chance to connect with an empathetic therapist and heal. Like any act of seeing, taking the Rorschach is a combination of shaping, thinking, and feeling, as Rorschach put it in his letter to Tolstoy.

  The feelings are especially important. A range of research has shown that effective psychotherapy has to be emotional: talking in intellectual terms is not always enough. One 2007 meta-analysis showed that therapists who specifically draw attention to emotions, making comments like “I noticed that your voice changed a bit when we were talking about your relationship, and I wonder what you are feeling right now,” get better results than therapists who don’t. This focus on emotions turns out to have an even greater positive effect than good rapport between therapist and patient.

  A visual test, Stephen Finn has argued, builds an emotional focus into the whole process. “Basically, I propose that tests like the Rorschach—because of their visual, emotionally arousing stimulus properties and the emotionally arousing aspects of their administration procedures—tap into material that is more reflective of right-hemisphere functioning. Other tests like the MMPI ut
ilize more left-hemisphere functions because of their verbal format and nonemotionally arousing administration. (I don’t want to overly simplify—obviously, both types of tests utilize both hemispheres to some degree.)” It’s not just that Rorschach responses—bears, explosions—are easy to talk about. The mere fact that patients are asked to look and see allows therapists to measure “aspects of emotional and interpersonal functioning that are not well captured by other assessment procedures.” It makes sense that Finn’s key metaphor for testing would be visual: the Rorschach as an “empathy magnifier,” not an empathy amplifier. A visual task can create the emotional bonds that help make healing possible.

  Certainly compared to answering a questionnaire. In one collaborative/therapeutic assessment of a troubled eight-year-old girl, the mother told the psychologists afterward that the Rorschach was the most helpful part of the assessment for gaining new insight into her child, “because it demonstrated that she is not all drama and contrived and that really and truly she does not see things the way the rest of the world sees things.” Follow-ups to the therapy showed real changes in their family, including both mother and daughter reporting a decrease in family conflict and decreased symptoms in the girl, and both parents reporting “feeling more patient, empathic, compassionate, and hopeful” toward their daughter and “less frustrated, less like they wanted to give up, less at their wits end.” Seeing through her eyes brought them closer to the child than hearing what she said.

  Along with its emotional power, seeing is also a cognitive process unlike any other. Rudolf Arnheim’s classic Visual Thinking (1969) is still the most compelling argument for the radical notion that seeing doesn’t precede thinking or give the mind something to think about, it is thinking. He showed how “the cognitive operations called thinking”—exploring, remembering and recognizing, grasping patterns, solving problems, simplifying and abstracting, comparing and connecting and contextualizing, symbolizing—do not take place somewhere above and beyond the act of seeing but are “the essential ingredients of perception itself.” More than that, organizational problems such as grasping patterns or the character of a complex phenomenon can be solved only in the act of perception: a connection cannot be analyzed or thought about without it first being seen; the intelligence is in the seeing.

  Interest in visual thinking, a relatively marginal but persistent tradition, is on the rise in our ever more image-saturated world. A passionate minority has continued to advocate for an emphasis on arts education and “visual literacy” as essential for making better citizens. Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and its sequels (1983, 1990, 1997) showed how much visual intelligence needs to go into the seemingly simple task of presenting information. Donald Hoffman’s Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (1998) reiterated Arnheim’s claims using decades of newer science. Effective visual thinking in a business context was championed in Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures (2008), which proved its own point by becoming a huge bestseller, while Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (2014) brought Arnheim into the online, smartphone age.

  The point here is not that the inkblots should be used for the display of quantitative information or to sell ideas on the back of a napkin. It’s that we can understand how the inkblots work as a psychological test only when we understand them as Rorschach did—in the broader context of vision, with all its emotion, intelligence, and creativity.

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  In principle, then, the Rorschach test rests on one basic premise: Seeing is an act not just of the eye but of the mind, and not just of the visual cortex or some other isolated part of the brain but of the whole person. If that is true, a visual task that calls upon enough of our perceptual powers will reveal the mind at work.

  A recent analysis by Gregory Meyer has helped quantify the inkblots’ unique ability to activate our perceptions. It is not true that any formless shapes would work just as well; as Rorschach knew and some others have recognized, the blots are not “meaningless” or “random.” After all, over the course of a century spent looking at the inkblots—spent tallying, categorizing, and reframing what people see, everything you can imagine and quite a lot you can’t—one truth has remained unassailable: Card V looks like a bat. Or maybe a butterfly.

  In Rorschach tests given between 2000 and 2007 to six hundred nonpatient Brazilian men and women, 370 of those people saw a bat in Card V; most of the others saw a butterfly or moth. There were, as usual, a lot of bears in Card II. In fact, out of roughly fourteen thousand total responses, there were only 6,459 different responses, and a small pool of thirty answers were common enough to be given by fifty or more people. The inkblots objectively do look like certain things, while they also invite interpretation. It wouldn’t be much of a test if everyone saw something totally different, or if almost everyone saw the same thing. In these six hundred tests, the long tail of personal variation consisted of about a thousand answers given by two people each, and fully 4,538 answers each given only once, including the “tragically misunderstood piece of cauliflower” seen by one depressed farmer.

  If you graph the responses, the near-vertical line on the left shows the inkblots’ common ground—the obvious bats and bears—while the horizontal line shows the leeway for personal idiosyncrasy. Meyer called this the Rorschach test’s structure and latitude. The graph also reveals a more specific pattern: the most common answer is twice as common as the second most frequent, three times as common as the third most frequent, all the way down.

  This is what’s known as a Zipf distribution, one of the mathematical ordering principles that structure the world. Other patterns are better known—the Fibonacci sequence in a nautilus shell, the bell curve of a random distribution—but the Zipf describes phenomena from earthquake size (there are very few huge ones and lots of little ones) to city populations, sizes of businesses, and word frequencies: in English “the” is twice as common as “of,” three times as common as “and,” on down to “cormorant” and “methylbenzamide.” Rorschach answers in a large sample will follow the same pattern. The bat on Card V is the “the” of the Rorschach.

  A single test also yields more than one data point. A person typically gives twenty, thirty answers over the course of the test, and a healthy test result won’t be stuck on either side of the Zipf curve. Only obvious answers would suggest you’re pretty guarded or rigid, or uninterested in the task, or boring, while too many unusual or bizarre answers might mean you have a poor grip on reality, or mania, or maybe you’re a rebel trying to be different.

  Finally, the Rorschach yields multiple data points in a sequence. The test is a fixed series of ten cards, but test takers have the freedom to give multiple answers per card in any order. A given person’s answers move up and down the Zipf curve, so to speak, a movement that itself has structure and latitude. Do your answers fall apart in the colored cards at the end of the test, or come together? Do you start with something obvious on every card and then get quirky, or do you arrive at popular, common answers only gradually? Even if two test takers somehow gave exactly the same answers to each card, but in a different order, maybe only one of them would have a rigid compulsion to give one kind of answer first and another last on every card, a pattern meaningful to a sensitive examiner.

  Using nothing but intuition, artistic skill, trial and error, and a few ideas about the power of symmetry, Hermann Rorschach created a set of pictures as inherently organized yet flexible as natural language or earthquakes. In this regard it is hard to imagine them bettered—psychologists have designed alternate series of inkblots over the years, but all fell more or less quickly by the wayside. Rorschach’s inkblots are like the act of seeing, which itself has both structure and latitude. There’s something really there, but not anything that constrains us completely. The visual nature of the world is objectively in things, but we see it there; we subjectively impose our view of the world onto thi
ngs, but only if that view fits what we see. We’re all looking at the same thing, even when we see it differently.

  Rorschach’s blots are unique in more than shape. The colors elicit emotion, even override the shapes, sometimes but not always. Putting movement into a still image is not easy—it takes an artist with real skill and, in Rorschach’s words, “spatial rhythm” (like a Michelangelo, unlike a Futurist). It is even harder to potentially convey a sense of movement, to some people and not to others. Almost anyone will see movement in pictures like Rorschach’s man struggling with a can (this page), but, as Rorschach wrote in 1919, “A key point is that the experiment is set up to make Movement responses difficult. If you show someone good pictures, then everyone, even the intellectually disabled, will seem to be a movement type.”

  The symmetry of the blots, as Rorschach acknowledged, makes people see “disproportionately many butterflies etc.,” but he was also right that “the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.” The blots’ horizontal symmetry helps people connect with them, even identify with them. The blots are not mathematically symmetrical—they have variations in tiny protuberances, streaks, and shading—but neither are animals or people, which is precisely why the blots are seen as balanced and alive. In addition, since groups of people we encounter in real life are next to each other, not on top of each other, horizontal symmetry creates a “social” connection between the two sides of any image. It makes different parts of the inkblots interact, like pairs of people or other creatures. The inkblot test wouldn’t have worked without horizontal symmetry: the blots wouldn’t have been personal, psychological.