The Inkblots

by Damion Searls

  In 2008, fifteen years after Hillary Clinton first called herself a Rorschach test, candidate Barack Obama did, too, but he meant something different. “I am like a Rorschach test,” he said. “Even if people find me disappointing ultimately, they might gain something.” Instead of labeling people as Red America or Blue America, Obama’s use of the metaphor cast himself as collaborative/therapeutic: giving people a helpful glimpse into themselves and moving forward. Our different individual reactions did not need to separate us. The Rorschach test obviously won’t bring us together any more than Obama did as president. Still, the metaphor has shifted in emphasis, from dividing to uniting.

  The point of the cliché has traditionally been that there are no wrong answers—a blurry image from the Hubble telescope would never have been called “a Rorschach test of competing theories,” because in that case one of the astronomical interpretations would be right and the others would be wrong. Now, though, the metaphor can be used that way, compatible with faith in a single, objective truth.

  One recent article, on new technology that lets archaeologists fly over the Amazon compiling data in a day that would have once taken decades to collect, mentioned in passing that “in areas of dense forest those technologies yield Rorschach-like images that even experts cannot decipher.” This is ambiguity without relativism: the truth is out there, and better technology will find it. Andy Warhol rejected self-expression and underlying meanings—“I want to be a machine”—but when Jay-Z used a Warhol Rorschach as the cover of his memoir, Decoded, both the title and the book itself, filled with explanations and backstories of the lyrics, put faith in the singular truth behind the code. Jeff Goldblum recently described a play he was acting in as “intended to be kind of like a Rorschach test or some kind of Cubist rendering so that simultaneously you get competing and equally viable narratives.” A Cubist painting sees every side at once, so in Goldblum’s metaphor we are all partly right, and all only partly, but the whole truth is there.

  A handful of examples can’t prove the zeitgeist, especially if one of them comes from Jeff Goldblum, but here’s one more. In Verizon’s “Reality Check” ad campaign from 2013, ordinary people in an art gallery of blotty images were asked: “How do you react when you first see this?” “It’s kind of like a dancer,” the first puzzled viewer answered, moving her arms (a Movement response!). Other gallery-goers said it was a witchlike shrew, or a bunch of berries. The images were actually cell-phone coverage maps—the ones in the background morphed to be symmetrical, Rorschach-style—and when faced with Verizon’s map, everyone knew it was “clearly a picture of the United States.” No latitude here. The last viewer, latte in hand, gave the only valid interpretation: “I should switch to Verizon immediately!” Personal interpretation was just an irrelevant distraction caused by technology’s failure to deliver; a “Reality Check” relies on there being a reality to check.

  Yet how can such shared reality be imposed on anyone who doesn’t see it for themselves? This is the controversy about diagnosis, about “labeling people,” about whether it’s right to block someone’s career or drastically intervene in his or her life because of a test. It’s the Hannah Arendt question: What gives someone the right to judge me? Fifty years on, the question is more potent than ever. People seem to feel that they have the right to their own facts, not just to their own opinions. But there are situations where the stakes are too high, or we are otherwise unwilling to throw up our hands at the existence of different worldviews and call it “a Rorschach test.”

  There is subjectivity in evaluating anyone, and in the end, people may disagree with and resent the evaluator. We don’t have the solid information we want, yet we still have to make real choices—in clinics, in schools, in courts—relying on fallible judgment. We can improve that judgment over time, but only with practice and never to perfection.

  We need to keep trying to put our decisions on as solid a basis as possible, as the decades of fierce fights over validity and standardization have tried to do. The widespread adoption of R-PAS, which addresses serious flaws in Exner’s system and returns to the scientific principles of continued research and development, would be a change for the better. But the fantasy of being able to know, to perfectly know, whether someone should be allowed to be a schoolteacher, or needs therapy, or should have custody of a child, is just that: a fantasy. A person is going to make mistakes with any set of tools. When a jury produces a tragic miscarriage of justice, we don’t conclude that trial by jury is wrong in principle.

  Cases like Rose Martelli’s are brutal anecdotal evidence against the Rorschach test, but anecdotal evidence is piled just as high on the other side, such as the nearly unbelievable story of Victor Norris with which I opened this book. As Norris’s evaluator told me, it is each individual psychologist’s job not to overpathologize, not the test’s job. She is the first to admit that the Rorschach “ends up being given wrongly by a lot of people.” Even if the Rorschach were a miraculously reliable and objective technique, there would still be an art in training people to use it properly, and countless ways human error might still creep in. A recent study found that judges regularly grant parole about two-thirds of the time when they hear a case first thing in the morning or after a food break, with the odds dropping to almost zero as the day wears on and their blood sugar drops. The Rorschach test is immune from none of these complications: nothing exists in isolation from our messy life in the world.

  This is why humility about the test is key, on the part of both advocates and skeptics. Hermann Rorschach had a stronger sense than anyone of the test’s concrete limitations, but also of the wider vistas it opened up onto the mind.

  —

  To end with: one last psychologist, and one last inkblot.

  When Dr. Ferriss gave me the Rorschach, his inkblot cards had not been used for some time. He rarely gives the test anymore. He acknowledged that it had had to be standardized for use in diagnostic and legal settings. But it also seemed to Ferriss that Exner’s system had “drained some of the life out of it”: mere scoring “loses the human touch.” Ferriss preferred to do content analysis, “the most interesting and psychoanalytical” approach, he felt, and just what the quantitative turn rejected.

  There are other reasons, though, why Ferriss doesn’t use the Rorschach. He works with defendants in the criminal justice system and doesn’t want to find anything that might send them to jail. The last Rorschach test he gave before mine was in a prison. Most test takers there have a disturbed profile—no surprise, since prison is about as disturbing an environment as you can get. Ferriss was working with a young African American man on trial for carrying a gun. His brother had just been shot dead in South Central L.A. and he knew he was a target. He came across as “angry and hostile,” as anyone would in those circumstances, so why give him a test? “You’re trying to tell his story,” Dr. Ferriss said. “You just don’t want to know how disturbed people are unless you’re diagnosing them in order to treat them.” But no one was considering giving this guy any treatment, only whether to lock him up and throw away the key.

  What would “perfecting the Rorschach test” look like for this defendant? Not tweaking the scores, compiling better norms, redefining administration procedures, or redoing the images, but using it to help, in a humane society, as part of a process of giving everyone who needs mental health care access to it. The argument can be made that Dr. Ferriss was concealing the truth by not giving his client the test, but truth exists in the context of what it is meant to be used for—which might be deciding whether someone needs help, or deciding whether to throw someone in jail.

  To move past the dead-end Rorschach controversies of the past, and to use to the fullest the ways the test reveals our minds at work, we have to open up what we are asking of it. We have to return, in fact, to Hermann Rorschach’s own broadly humanistic vision.

  Finally, Card I.

  In January 2002, it came to light that forty-year-old Steven Greenberg of San
Rafael, California, had been sexually molesting twelve-year-old Basia Kaminska for more than a year. She was the daughter of an immigrant single mother who lived in one of his apartments. It later turned out that the abuse had gone on since she was nine. The police showed up at his house with a search warrant; hours later, he drove his new Lexus to Petaluma Municipal Airport, took off in a single-engine plane, and flew it into Sonoma Mountain, leaving behind a minor media frenzy about the abuse and suicide.

  Here, unlike in the story with which I began this book, the names and identifying details have not been changed. Basia wants her story told.

  When Basia was seen by a psychologist, her tendency to minimize and deny her problems made self-report tests basically useless. On the Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children, the Beck Depression Index, the Beck Hopelessness Scale, the Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale, and the Piers-Harris Children’s Self-Concept Scale, as well as in talking to the psychologist, she underreported symptoms, said she had no feelings good or bad toward Greenberg, and claimed that she felt the events were behind her and she would rather not discuss them.

  Only two tests gave trustworthy results. Her IQ, as measured by the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC-III), was extremely high. And her scores on the Rorschach revealed emotional withdrawal, fewer psychological resources than one would think from how she presented herself, and a deeply damaged sense of identity.

  Her first response to Card I, the answer often interpreted as expressing one’s attitude about oneself, was something superficially conventional but actually quite crippled. The blot is often seen as a bat, though not as often as Card V is. What Basia saw was a bat with holes in its wings: “See, here’s the head, the wings, but they’re all messed up, they’ve got holes. It looks like maybe somebody attacked them and that’s sad. It looks very ripped right here and bat’s wings are usually precise. The wings would normally go out here. It sort of disrupts what it would normally be.” The rest of the test, both answers and scores, confirmed this first impression. The examining psychologist wrote in her notes: “Very damaged and hanging on by her fingernails with a shield of sophistication.” Her report concluded that Basia was “clearly emotionally damaged as a result of traumatic circumstances, in spite of her cool exterior and protests to the contrary.”

  Basia eventually sued the estate for damages, and four years later, the case went to court. Greenberg’s lawyers tried to use her earlier minimizing and denying against her. Then the psychologist read to the jury Basia’s Rorschach response.

  To be effective in a court of law, evidence has to be valid but it also has to be vivid. Forensic psychologists have had to master the technical debates around the Rorschach, to be able to respond to criticisms like the ones in What’s Wrong with the Rorschach?, but they also need to avoid getting into those debates at all. Research shows that clinical opinions in clear everyday language are more persuasive than statistical or methodological minutiae. Paradoxically, the more impressively quantitative and expert the testimony is, the more a bored or mystified jury is likely to reject or ignore it.

  Basia’s sad, messed-up bat had the ring of truth—it let the jury feel they had reached through the fog of prosecution and defense to this girl’s inner life, her real experience. It’s not magic. Anyone who looked at Basia and felt sure that the girl was lying or faking would not have had their mind changed by this test result or anything else. But what Basia had seen in the inkblot told her story. It helped the people in the courtroom see her, deeply and clearly, in a way the other pieces of testimony couldn’t.

  No argument, no test or technique or trick, will get around the fact that different people experience the world differently. It’s those differences that make us human beings, not machines. But our ways of seeing converge—or fail to converge—on something objective that’s really there: interpretation, as Rorschach insisted, is not imagination. He created his enigmatic inkblots in an age when it was easier to believe that pictures could reveal psychological truth and touch on the deepest realities of our lives. And through all the reimaginations of the test, the blots remain. The question “What might this be?” has an answer, when you’re looking, together, at something right in front of you.

  Olga, Wadim, and Lisa, 1923 Credit 9

  After Hermann Rorschach’s death in 1922, Olga was allowed to stay on in Herisau. She had worked as a doctor during Hermann’s years in Herisau, but only while Director Koller was away. Now she was offered a position at the Krombach, but only as an administrator—the reasons given being her lack of Swiss credentials, her seeming “foreign” to the patients, and her “having less authority as a doctor” than a man would have. That position ended on June 24, 1924, shortly after her forty-sixth birthday.

  According to Olga, Hermann had made a grand total of twenty-five francs from the inkblot test in his lifetime. With the modest sum paid out by Hermann’s life insurance, Olga was able to buy a home in nearby Teufen, which she set up as a small residential clinic where she would house and care for two or three patients at a time. Hermann’s contract with Ernst Bircher provided for royalties on Psychodiagnostics beginning with the second edition, which the book did not reach until 1932, partly because Ernst Bircher went bankrupt in 1927. A former employee, Hans Huber, who had helped with the original printing of Rorschach’s inkblots, was able to buy up the rights and restart the business as Hans Huber Verlag, now Hogrefe, which continues to publish the Rorschach test today.

  Olga led a lonely and precarious life, raising her two children and rarely able to practice medicine to her full potential. She never remarried, and she died in 1961 at age eighty-three. Lisa, forty-four years old in 1961, lived with Olga until the end, having studied English and Romance languages at the University of Zurich and worked as a teacher. She never married, and she died in 2006 at age eighty-five. Wadim studied medicine in Zurich, eventually had a psychiatric practice, and died in 2010 at age ninety-one. Rorschach had no grandchildren.

  On June 26, 1943, at the Ninety-Ninth Conference of the Swiss Psychiatric Society in Münsterlingen, site of their first married home by Lake Constance, sixty-five-year-old Olga Rorschach-Shtempelin gave a lecture called “Hermann Rorschach’s Life and Character.” Biographical information from the first half of her lecture has been used throughout this book; the second half is translated here in full.

  H.R.’s development rested on a scientific foundation, but his attitude toward life, toward people, toward the world, was emotional. He was very even-tempered, harmonious, friendly, and cheerful. He did not like problems and conflicts in human relationships—he almost instinctively rejected anyone and anything “dissatisfied” or “at odds with itself.” He always looked for unity and clarity.

  He was very modest and straightforward in daily life, frugal and unassuming, the “eternal student”; harmless and almost careless in practical things; not ambitious; a Parzival type. Throughout his life he kept a boyish sense of adventure, of being up for anything. He absolutely lived in the present, with a good sense of humor and liking humor in others.

  Lively in his physical movements, he considered himself a movement type. He had very deep feelings for friends, which he tended to hold back. Only in the small circle of his family did he give himself completely. Very loyal in his feelings, not authoritarian. He considered the feeling of deep respect to be the foremost cardinal virtue of humanity, and judged people on the basis of whether this quality was present or absent in them. He was a religious person but not pious, and indifferent to the official church.

  Above all, what interested him was the mind or spirit as it revealed itself in human dynamics. From this arose his great interest in religions, their founders and how they came to be; also myths, sects, and folklore. He saw in all these phenomena the revelation of the human creative/dynamic spirit. He saw in his mind’s eye the subterranean river of humanity through the centuries, from the ancient Greeks through Romanticism to our own era—from Dionysus through Anton Unternährer to Rasputin—
from Christ to Francis of Assisi. He loved this current of life in its multiplicity of appearances, in all its seeking and wandering. He often repeated the lines from Gottfried Keller: “Drink, oh eyes, all your lashes can hold / Of the golden abundance of the world.” How he felt this abundance of the world! History, as the path of humanity in the struggle of ideas and the transformations of form, interested him as well. With his pronounced tendency to synthesize, he was always looking for the connecting idea.

  He had no interest in, or understanding for, economic questions, and was indifferent to money, with no striving for worldly goods.

  He loved nature, the world of the mountains. While certainly no Alpinist, he went hiking in the mountains at some point or another every year. He tended not to talk much in the mountains. He loved the colors; his favorite color was gentian blue. His attitude toward music was purely emotional: he loved Lieder, the Romantics. In painting, he on the one hand preferred the Romantics, such as Schwind and Spitzweg; on the other hand, he admired Hodler for his representation of movement, and Böcklin for his colors, though he found Böcklin “dead.” He also appreciated the portraitists, especially the Russians. In the theater, he preferred cheerful comedies to tragedies and dramas. He liked going to the movies, which he found interesting primarily for the rich expressive possibilities of the faces and gestures.

  He was not especially well read, except in the specialized literature of his field. But on quiet evenings when living in the clinic he read a lot with his wife: Zola, “the photographer of life”; he avoided Strindberg, though, for medical reasons. He loved Jeremias Gotthelf, Gottfried Keller, and Tolstoy, whom he considered the “greatest artists.” He was especially interested in Dostoyevsky, with his spirited dynamism, his philosophical problems of life, his search for God, and the problem of Christ. He read the Russians in the original, of course. He planned to write about Dostoyevsky, but never did.