André Breton grouped: André Breton, L’écart absolu catalog (Paris: Galerie l’Œil, 1965); see José Pierre, André Breton et la peinture (Paris: L’ge d’Homme, 1987), 253.
“will help us someday gain”: Rilke, letter to Lou-Andreas Salomé, September 10, 1921.
visually interesting material: Morgenthaler later said that many of the artworks in his collection “were obtained through [Rorschach’s] persevering efforts” with patients (Ellenberger, 191). Rorschach’s work on sects also helped encourage Morgenthaler to devote his time to Wölfli. Morgenthaler had been interested in sects too: his earlier research on the history of treating insanity in Bern had led him to Unternährer, and he had collected an archive of material intending to return to the topic. But when he found out what Rorschach had already done, and realized that Rorschach would make quicker and better use of his archive, he handed it over and abandoned the topic (Morgenthaler, 98–99).
Chapter 9: Pebbles in a Riverbed
early autumns: To Paul, September 27, 1920; Ellenberger, 185–87. One August, Hermann wrote to Paul: “Alas, the summer vacation was summer’s end. Here in Herisau, winter is almost upon us, and a few days after our sunbathing we already had to fire up our stove and walked around sniffling” (August 20, 1919).
The Krombach: Koller, reminiscences, quoted in WSM; Ellenberger, 185–87; Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, ed. Marco Jorio (Basel: Schwabe, 2002–), “Herisau.”
Rorschach identified more closely: Morgenthaler, 96; WSI Regineli.
When the moving van arrived: WSI Sophie Koller; to Paul, ca. late November 1915.
his son remembers telling: WSI Fritz Koller.
“somewhat small-minded”: To Paul, March 16, 1916.
“Statistics Week”: To Roemer, January 27, 1922; to Oberholzer, January 8, 1920; to Oberholzer, January 6, 1921.
Koller’s son Rudi remembered: WSI Rudi Koller.
Rorschach’s workdays began: WSI Martha Schwarz-Gantner and Bertha Waldburger-Abderhalden.
“More or less exactly at midnight”: Diary, 75.
Rorschach was personally responsible: To Morgenthaler, October 11, 1916; Diary, 54.
Koller was afraid that his superiors: From Koller, June 28, 1915.
“As you can see”: To Morgenthaler, March 12, 1917.
Swiss Psychoanalytic Society: This group was created to be more Freudian than the Swiss Psychiatric Society and yet independent of Freud’s own party-line International Psychoanalytic Society. “Even if Freud appears here and there with an all too papal nimbus,” Rorschach wrote to Morgenthaler, encouraging him to join the new group, “the danger of hierarchicalization is best avoided when people come together and create a counterweight, representing different points of view” (to Morgenthaler, November 11, 1919; see also L, 139n1 and 175n5, and to Oberholzer, February 16, 1919). Ernest Jones wrote to Freud that its “best members are Binswanger, a psychiatrist Rhorschach, and Frau Dr. Oberholzer” (March 25, 1919, quoted in L, 152n1).
“It’s too bad”: To Morgenthaler, May 21, 1920.
“Here in the provinces”: To Oberholzer, May 3, 1920.
While his friends said they were jealous: From Oberholzer, January 4, 1922.
“interesting people”: To Roemer, January 27, 1922.
“if you put a piece of paper: Morgenthaler, 98.
Rorschach had tried to volunteer: Morgenthaler, 97.
He and Olga volunteered: To Paul, March 16, 1916.
“There was a sudden reversal”: To Paul, December 15, 1918.
“in defiance of all truth”: To Paul, December 15, 1918.
“Have you read or heard about”: To Burri, September 27, 1920.
“I’m only just beginning”: To Paul, September 27, 1920.
“What do you think”: To Burri, December 28, 1920.
financial situation: WSI Bertha Waldburger-Abderhalden. “Everything costs a lot,” Rorschach wrote to Paul. “Wages are rising, so the tailor makes about as much as I do….It’s total madness. Everyone thinks he would live better if only he were paid more, and then everyone is shocked when the prices rise for everything” (April 24, 1919). Months later: “Our salary circumstances have improved somewhat but only to the point where we can now and then replace the clothes we have worn out in recent years. It doesn’t go much further than that” (July 22, 1919).
“At least we have always gotten”: To Paul, August 20, 1919, slightly modified.
“I am constantly in the woodworking shop”: To Paul, April 24, 1919. Bookshelves: Diary 83, January 28, 1920.
His great joy in Herisau: See WSI, esp. Bertha Waldburger-Abderhalden and Anna Ita; to Oberholzer, May 3 and May 18, 1920, and to Paul, May 29, 1920.
“one genuine Swiss name”: To Paul, May 6, 1919.
Anna made it out of Russia: To Oberholzer, August 6, 1918.
married soon afterward: Anna’s husband was a widowed father of three named Heinrich Berchtold, and Rorschach perceived the family dynamics at once: “It won’t be easy to raise the three boys, of course,” he wrote to Paul. “But one good thing is that the oldest is mostly out of the picture since he won’t be living there much longer. The youngest is a darling, and she will probably be able to make him completely her own. The middle one is the one who will definitely give her the most trouble.” In any case, “Annali will do well with the groom….He may bump up against certain bohemian attitudes here and there, which she has picked up from her Russian student circles, but I’m sure they’ll wear off soon enough” (To Paul, April 24, 1919).
Paul was married, too: He had met Reine Simonne Laurent in Amboise and taken her to Brazil; they got married in Paris, and their daughter, Simonne, would be born in Bahia in 1921. PD, Case 6 (136–137), “Introverted Predisposition in an Extravert Career,” is Paul, presenting Hermann’s view of his brother in the language of diagnosis: “The subject comes from a talented family and became a businessman more for external reasons than to follow his own impulses….He has marked introversive traits that he has not had time to cultivate because of the heavy demands for disciplined thinking life has placed upon him. Well-ordered affect, good capacity for both intensive and extensive rapport, especially good emotional adaptability….Taken together, these qualities form the basis for a certain gift for humor. He is a good observer and original reporter of what he has seen.”
These births and weddings awakened Hermann’s interest in his family history, and his genealogical researches resulted in a calligraphed thirty-two-page book elaborately hand-drawn on heavy paper, written in the archaic style of an ancient chronicle, and richly illustrated with pictures including the ruin of the castle of the Counts von Rorschach, escutcheons, silhouettes, scenes of family members’ hometowns, and imagined scenes from the lives of his ancestors. He would give the document to Paul in 1920 as a belated Christmas present (HRA 1:3; cf. Diary, late 1919).
She later remembered Hermann: WSI Regineli.
His cousin remembered him: WSI Fanny Sauter.
licked it: Priscilla Schwarz, Wolfgang’s daughter who remained closest to Lisa Rorschach, interview, 2013.
For Christmas one year: Diary, September 15, 1919.
“I’m hoping to send you”: To Paul, April 24, 1919.
But not all was well: WSI Fritz Koller, Sophie Koller, Regineli, Martha Schwarz-Gantner.
The Kollers: Rorschach felt particularly close to the oldest Koller child, Eddie, an artist who planned to attend the same art school in Zurich where Rorschach’s father had studied. Eddie suffered increasingly from depression—a development Rorschach predicted, and followed with concern—before committing suicide in 1923, at age nineteen.
On a boat ride with family: WSI Fanny Sauter; see also to Paul, March 16, 1916; L 139n3; Ellenberger 187.
staging plays: Blum/Witschi, 84–93.
“He could instantly”: Rorschach was “particularly masterful in observing, capturing, and recording movement” (Miecyzslav Minkovski, obituary for Hermann Rorschach, in CE, 84).
“My wife
would like”: To Oberholzer, December 12, 1920.
In mid-1917: Olga would write much later that “in 1917” her husband “returned to his interest in ‘chance-form inkblots’ that he had left aside for years (perhaps inspired by S. Hens’s dissertation, which obviously reminded him of the experiments he had conducted in Münsterlingen in 1911)” (Olga R, 91). “There can be little doubt that the stimulating impulse came from the research work of Szymon Hens” (Ellenberger, 189). In three interviews in 1959, Hens said he met with Rorschach twice, six months apart, then said three or four months apart; the meetings were in 1917, then he wasn’t sure if the first mightn’t have been in 1916, then he wondered if it was 1918. He also said it was when he was twenty-five years old (December 1916 to December 1917) and before the publication of his dissertation (December 1917). The most likely date for the decisive meeting is in mid- to late 1917.
Hens used eight crude black blots: Szymon Hens, Phantasieprüfung mit formlosen Klecksen bei Schulkindern, normalen Erwachsenen und Geisteskranken (Zurich: Fachschriften-Verlag, 1917). He is sometimes described as having tested subjects’ “fantasies,” but this is a mistranslation of Phantasie, “imagination.”
Hens spent the rest of his life convinced that Rorschach stole his idea, and he passed down this claim to fame to his daughter and granddaughter (“to put it delicately, my father’s ink blots were ‘adopted’ by Rorschach”: “Honorable Joyce Hens Green,” Oral History Project, Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit, 1999–2001, pp. 4–5 [www.dcchs.org/JoyceHensGreen/joycehensgreen_complete.pdf]; “my grandfather was the author of the Rorschach Ink Blot Test…Dr. Rorschach conveniently got the credit for it as he used my Grandfather’s research in his presentations and studies”: Ancestry.com, Surname: Hens, thread “Western New York Hens,” message posted November 4, 2010 [boards.ancestry.com, last retrieved August 2016]). One still finds mention of Hens’s priority, especially in accounts trying to impute plagiarism or intellectual dishonesty to Rorschach.
Rorschach cited Hens in a February 1919 lecture (HRA 3:2:1:1), in letters, and in PD: “Hens suggests some of the questions of form investigated here, although he cannot go into them more deeply” because of his exclusive concern with content. Elsewhere: “I have to emphasize that my own work did not proceed from Hens’s. I was exploring a perceptual-diagnostic form-interpretation experiment for years already, and conducted experiments with the Altnau secondary school as early as 1911, while based in Münsterlingen, in connection with my dissertation on reflex hallucinations.” The starting point for the test was the investigation of reflex hallucinations in his dissertation, though “of course the whole psychiatric approach and psychological mind-set goes back to the influence of Bleuler and his writings” (PD, 102–3; to Hans Maier, November 14, 1920; to Roemer, June 18, 1921).
Hens himself (WSI) alternately said that he hadn’t contributed much to the test, that the test was inadequate, that “people will attack me if I say the Rorschach test is not scientific,” and that “it was wrong” for an academic conference to have the biggest round table on Rorschach: “Maybe I’m envious that it’s Rorschach and not Hens. It should be Hens-Rorschach.” He also admitted that “maybe Rorschach did have the idea four or five years earlier than 1917,” before saying that Rorschach got everything from him: “Where else would Rorschach have gotten the idea from?”
Szymon Hens immigrated to the United States, changed his name to James Hens, and was later sentenced to five years in jail for trying to help would-be draft dodgers during World War II (Harry Lever and Joseph Young, Wartime Racketeers [New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1945], 95ff.). In 1959, Wolfgang Schwarz tracked him down for three dramatic interviews (WSI). Schwarz claimed to observe him manipulating and flirting inappropriately with patients, “a total abuse of his role as a physician,” and found him paranoid, repeatedly worrying about “making enemies” if he said what he really thought, and simultaneously “obsessed with feelings of omnipotence,” to the point where Schwarz felt he “seemed insane.”
purely by content: Hens, Phantasieprüfung, 12.
“his girlfriends”: WSI Hens.
“The mentally ill do not interpret”: Hens, Phantasieprüfung, 62.
Chapter 10: A Very Simple Experiment
The blots had to not look “made”: Galison calls the inkblots “an exquisite art of artlessness” (271, cf. 273–74); the test’s “neutrality” is central to Galison’s fine essay, which I read early in the process of writing this book and which influenced my thinking more than is explicitly reflected in these notes. Gamboni expands (65–72). For the importance of the blots as having “made themselves,” see note on this page “countless visual connections.”
After “spending a long time”: To Roemer, March 22, 1922. Specifically, “in the interest of better comparisons between results, more reliable calculations, and a greater likelihood of Movement responses.”
“conducted either like a game”: Draft, 1.
an experiment: It was originally intended as a “perceptual-diagnostic experiment and dynamic tool for the further development of psychological and psychiatric theorizing,” not “the ossified psycho-technology ‘test’ it has since become” (Akavia, 10).
The choice to make the blots symmetrical: Later, he read Ernst Mach on symmetry and praised him as “an independent thinker!” but found nothing in it to add to his own ideas (Diary, October 21, 1919).
from Vischer’s essay: “On the Optical Sense,” 98 (see chap. 7 above).
to use red: See Ernest Schachtel, “On Color and Affect: Contributions to an Understanding of Rorschach’s Test,” Psychiatry 6 (1943): 393–409.
Anthropologists would discover: Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Marshall Sahlins, “Colors and Cultures” (1976), in Culture in Practice: Selected Essays (New York: Zone Books, 2000), gives more facts about red and puts these seemingly biological findings back in the context of culture.
“to come up with an answer”: PD, 104.
whether or not he told: PD, 16.
Two responses: Draft 24–25; PD, 103, 137–39.
“Barack Obama”: Quoted by James Choca, “Reclaiming the Rorschach from the Empiricist Pawn Shop,” Society for Personality Assessment conference, New York, March 6, 2015.
Interpretations of chance images: PD, 16.
on August 5: To Miecyzslav Minkovski, August 5, 1918. PD uses cases from Draft, and since comparisons require use of “the same series of plates” or “an analogous series suitably standardized” (PD, 20, 52), the images must have been finalized by 1918. At some point his cards had gaps in the numbering after the current III and VI, but the letter to Minkovski mentions ten cards, as does his letter to Bircher, May 29, 1920. The claim that Rorschach’s publisher “accepted only ten cards” from “the manuscript with 15 original cards” is false (Ellenberger, 206, see L, 230n1).
Summary in the rest of the chapter taken from Draft unless noted.
“The resurrection”: By PD (163) he would call the answer “a very complex contamination” and score it more fully: the whole statement is “DW CF– Abstract Original–” (“DW” = a Whole confabulated from a Detail); the “resurrection” (pointing to the red animals being resurrected) is “DM+ A” (“A” = animal); the color-naming is “DCC”; the “veins” is “Dd CF– Anatomy Original–”; and “Other determining factors of the interpretation cannot be obtained.”
“Maybe we’ll soon reach the point”: To Burri, May 28, 1920.
Whole responses could be a good sign: Draft, Case 15; PD, Case 16.
“It concerns a very simple experiment”: To Julius-Springer Verlag, February 16, 1920.
Chapter 11: It Provokes Interest and Head-Shaking Everywhere
Greti Brauchli: Diary, October 26 to November 4, 1919; letters to and from Greti and Hans Burri, cited below; WSI Hans Burri and Greti Brauchli-Burri.
“He underst
ood it!”: Diary, October 6, 1919.
“who truly understood the experiment”: Brauchli was “the first person after Oberholzer” to understand—see note for Emil Oberholzer on this page.
“Thank you for your report!”: From Greti Brauchli, November 2, 1919.
Rorschach wrote a warm reply: To Greti Brauchli dated November 5, 1919, written November 4.
“my compulsive neurotic clergyman”: To Oberholzer, May 6, 1920.
“An analysis must never be”: To Burri, January 15, 1920.
Burri’s seventy-one responses: PD, 146–55, and Diary, 77–83; see Diary February 7, 1920, and to Burri, May 20, and from Burri, May 21, 1920.
“Thank you for everything”: From Greti, May 22, 1920.
Four months later: To Burri, September 27, 1920. Fifty years later, in 1970, Burri called Rorschach’s death a catastrophe as tears welled up in Greti’s eyes (WSI).
a journal: Constantin von Monakov’s Swiss Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, where Rorschach often published (L, 148n2). See to Monakov, August 28 and September 23, 1918; to Morgenthaler, January 7, 1920. Monakov (1853–1930), an internationally renowned Russian neurologist who held the first chair in neurology at the University of Zurich Medical School, reappeared many times in Rorschach’s life. He may have been the first to interest Rorschach in Russia. He treated Rorschach’s father, Ulrich. Rorschach took courses with him starting in 1905 and did his work on the pineal gland under him. By 1913, they were close colleagues—when Rorschach left for Russia, Monakov wrote a notice for a local newspaper that called it “regrettable in the highest degree that the institution [at Münsingen] was not able to keep him here.” “Don’t stay too long in Moscow,” he wrote directly to Rorschach. “You can do better in Switzerland, whether as a neurologist or a psychiatrist.” Rorschach joked at one point that it might be better to discourage Monakov from attending his lecture on sects, “because otherwise he might undergo another collapse, which would weigh on my conscience. Someone needs to tell him that the subject is psychoanalytical through and through—i.e., for him, so to speak, life-threatening.” In 1922, he was considering returning to work with Monakov, “the way I had planned to in Münsingen”; intellectually, he felt that “Bleuler’s concept of perception is outdated,” and he stated that “not only my personal inclination, but also the facts, are pushing me in a Monakovian biological direction” (Anna R, 73; WSM; L, 127n1, 128n4; to Mieczyslav Minkovski, August 5, 1918; to Monakov, August 8 and December 9, 1918; to Oberholzer, June 29, 1919; to Max Müller, January 6, 1922).
The Inkblots Page 42
