a version where buyers would color: To Monakov, September 23, 1918 (more literally: “Such archaic thoughts one has nowadays”).
“happy that it hadn’t been printed”: To Morgenthaler, January 7, 1920.
“Subjectively, I feel”: Lecture to the Pedagogical-Psychological Society of St. Gallen, February 1919, HRA 3:2:1:1.
coined the term: Ellenberger, 225.
Emil Oberholzer: 1883–1958. His wife was the Russian Jewish psychiatrist Mira Gincburg (1884–1949), an important psychoanalyst in her own right who had analyzed Oberholzer before sending him to Freud in 1913. In 1919, they opened a practice together (L, 138–39n1; Müller, Abschied vom Irrenhaus, 160).
“the control experiments were as follows”: To Julius-Springer Verlag, February 16, 1920.
a bit ambivalent: PD, 121.
“it looks so much like”: To Oberholzer, June 15, 1921.
“Where in Herisau”: To Roemer, March 15, 1922.
when he was able to explain: Diary, November 4, 1919.
handed his blots over: Morgenthaler, 100.
already intrigued: “After 1918, there was only one analyst whose work Bleuler took a lively interest in: Hermann Rorschach. He praised the Rorschach test publicly and in private” (Schröter, introduction to Freud and Bleuler, “Ich bin zuversichtlich,” 54).
“Hens really should have explored”: Diary 63, November 2, 1919.
tests of all his children: To Oberholzer, June 3, 1921.
future psychiatrist Manfred Bleuler: “Der Rorschachsche Formdeutversuch bei Geschwistern,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 118.1 (1929): 366–98; see Müller, Abschied vom Irrenhaus, 164.
“You can easily imagine”: To Roemer, June 18, 1921.
“Amazingly positive”: Quoted in Rorschach to Oberholzer, June 28, 1921.
“confirmed his results”: CE, 254.
“a certain plan”: To Paul, August 20, 1919.
“All dark things, you see!”: To Roemer, September 21, 1919.
“An analysis that goes well”: To Roemer, January 27, 1922.
from normal subjects: Nine were from healthy subjects, four from people with neuroses but not serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. To call this a shift is perhaps an overstatement: “From the beginning, even from the first experiments ten years ago, I have always tried the experiment on normals of all kinds. That is clear from the book—first and foremost, it’s about normals” (to Roemer, June 18, 1921).
By February 1919: Quotes in this paragraph and next from Lecture in St. Gallen (see note “Subjectively, I feel” on this page, and L, 182–84n).
“the trickiest problem”: Quotes from PD unless noted: 25–26, 31, 33–36, 77–79, 86–87, 94–95, 107, 110–13.
A colleague: Georg Roemer, Vom Rorschachtest zum Symboltest (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1938). In one case, their discussion changed the total number of M responses in a test from seven to two.
“Color”: Diary, October 21, 1919.
ever more daring: In PD (see note “the trickiest problem,” above) and Diary, early September and December 12, 1919.
earliest childhood memories: Rorschach speculated that movement memories were linked to early childhood, so the number of M’s indicated the age of one’s earliest memories—or was a sign of repressing those memories if the ages didn’t match (Diary, November 3, 1919). He quickly abandoned the theory as too simple, but not before collecting several people’s first memories and recording his own:
EARLIEST CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
self: 6–7 years old—dim memory of playing together with Mother’s youngest sister, Brother, and Sister in the hallway of the silk-weaving school—a long hallway, whose rear end is appropriately dim—I feel that this is connected to the “dim” memory—the game is ‘Witches’: Aunt runs after us with a broom—everything very faded and blurry—
As he surely realized, this memory weaves together different periods of his childhood. He must have been seven or eight, since Paul was born when Hermann was seven. Another of his mother’s sisters, not the youngest, was to play a crucial role in his life as his stepmother. The silk-weaving school was doubtless the famous one in his birthplace, Zurich. There are those brooms again, as in his strange insistence on “New Year’s mummers with brooms” as a Movement response (HRA 3:3:14:2).
missionary from the Gold Coast: H. Henking.
Emil Lüthy: 1890–1966. L, 208–9n6; WSI Lüthy; Diary, October 11, 1919.
“In truth, every artist”: PD, 109. To Lüthy, January 17, 1922, includes more than a dozen color swatches and fascinating conjectures—such as purple being the most complicated and mysterious color because it oscillates between red and blue, warm and cold. Light violets can seem incredibly fresh and young, while “a dark heavy rich blue-purple looks mystical (the theosophist color!).”
students, usually Bleuler’s: The flakiest was Hedwig Etter, who had proposed a dissertation on the inkblot experiment and contacted Rorschach in 1920. She was offered the volunteer position at Krombach, despite Rorschach’s reservations, and left Koller and Rorschach in the lurch two days before her start date. After all the time Rorschach and Oberholzer put in collecting test material for her, she headed off to Vienna to see Freud and was never heard from again after September 1921 (L, 213–4n1, passim).
Hans Behn-Eschenburg: 1893–1934. L, 187n5 and passim; Müller, “Zwei Schüler von Hermann Rorschach,” chap. 10 in Abschied vom Irrenhaus.
“Whoever wanted to work”: Gertrud Behn-Eschenburg, “Working with Dr. Hermann Rorschach,” JPT 19.1 (1955): 3–5.
Behn gave the Rorschach: His dissertation was “Psychological Examination of Schoolchildren with the Form Interpretation Test.”
“The fourteenth year”: To Burri, July 16, 1920.
unassailable and make a good impression: To Behn-Eschenburg, November 14, 1920.
Rorschach wrote whole sections: “He botched his dissertation about my experiment so miserably that finally I had to do almost the whole thing myself” (to Paul, January 8, 1921); “I just couldn’t stand by and watch him mess up all that material so rich in problems and new perspectives” (to Oberholzer, December 12, 1920). To Behn’s adviser Hans Maier: “I saw only too late that such projects actually do require much more than the simplicity of the method might suggest, and that they are not very well suited for beginners” (January 24, 1921). Behn’s series of images was later publicized by child psychologist Hans Zulliger as the “Behn-Rorschach Test,” but Behn himself published nothing further on the inkblots.
“The experiment is very simple”: To Behn-Eschenburg, November 28, 1920.
Georg Roemer: 1892–1972. Müller, “Zwei Schüler”; L, 164–66n1 and passim; Blum/Witschi, 94–107. The most important of Roemer’s many statements is “Hermann Rorschach und die Forschungsergebnisse seiner beiden letzten Lebensjahre” (Psyche 1 [1948]: 523–42).
Like Paul, Roemer appears anonymously in PD; Case 2: “The subject is a scientist, multitalented, draws and paints. A keen observer and clear thinker, well-rounded education, a bit inclined to get scattered and fragmented. Easily upset; very thorough in what interests him, but quickly jumps from one topic to the next….Allows himself to be carried away by his emotions; his emotional instability is rather strongly egocentric.”
“I too think the experiment”: To Roemer, January 11 or 12, 1921.
making inkblot series of his own: Diary, November 13, 1919.
“the subject being taken”: PD, 121–22.
“I find your questions extremely interesting”: To Roemer, January 11 or 12, 1921.
Martha Schwarz: later Schwarz-Gantner (b. 1894). WSI; L 322n2. Amusingly, she thought her job interview would be very competitive, but of course they were desperate to fill the unpaid position at Herisau. Rorschach asked her if she could act in the plays—she’d play the serious parts, he the comic ones. Could she sing? Play the piano? Dance? Good, she was hired. They became good friends, often strolling down to town together to buy tea or cake.
She inkblot-tested her whole family and said that she learned a lot about people from his interpretations—“I could treat my parents much more fairly after that. Rorschach did this very quietly.”
Albert Furrer: L, 284n3, quotes from to Roemer, May 23 and June 18, 1921, and to Paul, October 16, 1921.
“The point is not to illustrate”: To Bircher, May 19, 1920.
“Trying the experiment”: To Oberholzer, July 18, 1919.
Oskar Pfister: 1873–1956. If Bleuler and Jung were key figures in bringing Freud into the hospitals, Pfister was key to bringing him into the culture. The eventual author of more than 270 books, Pfister was a pastor who continued to believe that psychology was compatible with religious belief. He encountered psychoanalysis through Jung in 1908 and wrote the first textbook of psychoanalysis in 1913, with an introduction by Freud; his “thoroughly Christian outlook on psychoanalysis had proved unnerving but not completely indigestible” to Freud (Kerr, Most Dangerous Method, 210), and he remained a crucial figure in the story of Freud and religion. Freud asked Pfister to reply to his key book The Future of an Illusion (1927), which he did in “The Illusion of a Future: A Friendly Disagreement with Prof. Sigmund Freud” (1928; translated in International Journal of Psychoanalysis 74.3 [1993]: 557–79). Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, Psycho-Analysis and Faith: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister (London: Hogarth Press, 1963); Alasdair MacIntyre, “Freud as Moralist,” New York Review of Books, February 20, 1964.
popular version: Rorschach had put his sect studies aside for almost a year to work on the test, but in October 1920, thinking PD would be published any day, he planned to return to them. “Here is my advice,” Pfister wrote: “Thick books are so expensive nowadays that no one buys them, and hence no one reads them. But publish monographs on the sect material! First, a piece for us, ‘Sects and Mental Illness.’ Accessible but well grounded scientifically—as goes without saying for you….Even for a research scientist, it is excellent practice to write for a popular audience, and you can often reach a much wider audience that way.” Rorschach quickly agreed—“It won’t be hard to fill fifty pages on the topic. I think I can write the thing for you this winter”—although, as he told Oberholzer, “I naturally don’t want to use up my best material, Binggeli and Unternährer, in a little popular pamphlet, so I have to pull together other material, which is taking a bit more work than I had anticipated” (from Pfister, October 18 and November 3, 1920; to Pfister, November 7, 1920; to Oberholzer, March 20, 1921).
Walter Morgenthaler: He much later set up a Rorschach Commission (1945), founded the International Rorschach Society (1952), and established the Hermann Rorschach Archive (1957). But he published nothing on the Rorschach in the twenties and thirties, except for the second edition of PD (Rita Signer’s pamphlet The Hermann Rorschach Archives and Museum [Bern, n.d.], 28ff.; Müller, Abschied vom Irrenhaus, 153).
“the long wet Herisau spring”: To Morgenthaler, May 21, 1920. “My manuscript is finished”: to Bircher, June 22, 1920. Drafts: HRA 3.3.6.2 and 3.3.6.3.
he had mused: In a diary that Rorschach kept for six months starting in September of 1919—uncharacteristically for him, and further confirmation of his introvert turn at ages thirty-three to thirty-five. The first entry protested that it was only “a kind of diary” because “keeping a diary is a pedantic thing to do.”
Bircher’s first letter to Rorschach: November 18, 1919.
Rorschach wrote to his brother: December 4, 1919.
in a different font: To Oberholzer, January 14, 1921.
so many capital “F”s: To Roemer, March 1921.
One letter: To Bircher, May 29, 1920.
Morgenthaler argued in August 1920: To and from Morgenthaler, August 9–20.
“extremely arrogant”: To Roemer, January 11 or 12, 1921.
Psychodiagnostics was published: To Bircher, June 19, 1921.
“I think that this research”: From Oberholzer, July 12, 1920.
“Dear Doctor”: From Pfister, June 23, 1921.
“All of them future ministers”: To Burri, November 5, 1921.
he had plans to test: Ibid.
in November 1921: CE, 254.
“Well, it’s made it—”: CE, 100.
“Bleuler has now expressed”: To Martha Schwarz, December 7, 1921.
Arthur Kronfeld’s 1922 review: CE, 230–33.
Ludwig Binswanger: CE, 234–47, originally published in 1923, but a letter from Binswanger, January 5, 1922, expressed directly to Rorschach the same praise of PD and criticism of its lack of theoretical basis.
William Stern: L, 218n4, 335n1.
“approach was artificial”: Ellenberger, 225–26, who suggested that Stern’s reaction “depressed” Rorschach—even that this depression made Rorschach fail to seek medical treatment the following year—but the evidence does not bear this out.
“proposing unnecessary modifications”: To Oberholzer, June 17, 1921.
“Multiple different series”: To Roemer, June 18, 1921. “On the whole,” Rorschach went on, before giving a long list of caveats and concerns, “you vastly underemphasize the difficulties involved” in administering and interpreting the test.
“more approachable”: To Guido Looser, July 11, 1921. See also his complaints about Roemer’s behavior in a letter to Binswanger, February 3, 1922.
A Chilean doctor: Fernando Allende Navarro.
“North America would obviously”: To Roemer, January 27, 1922.
the only racial or ethnic difference: PD, 97, 112. “It is, of course, nothing new to find that the Appenzeller is more emotionally adaptable, has greater rapport, and is physically more active than the reserved, stolid, slow Bernese, but it is worth pointing out that the test confirms this piece of common knowledge.” Elsewhere, Rorschach attributed the high Appenzeller suicide rate to their being far more emotionally expressive than other Swiss, so that they acted out their depressions (1920 Health Commission meeting, WSA). A recent essay pokes gentle fun at the fact that, since Rorschach said so little in PD about cultural differences, Oberholzer had to bring in a comparison to Appenzeller Swiss in discussing the Indonesian Alorese in the 1940s (Blum/Witschi, 120). For what it’s worth, Jung, too, told his advanced students that when visiting the American Southwest he was “enormously struck by the resemblance of the Indian women of the Pueblos to the Swiss women in Canton Appenzell, where we have descendants of Mongolian invaders.” This is one explanation he offers for “why Americans are closer to the Far East than Europeans” (Introduction to Jungian Psychology: Notes of the Seminar on Analytical Psychology Given in 1925 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012], 116).
ethnographic and sect-related research: Rorschach’s last review summaries for Freud’s journal Imago were about two comparative studies of drawings by European children and Dakota Indians, a nonpsychoanalytic book on indigenous child raising, and a study of Antonianer (CE, 311–14, all 1921).
Chinese populations: WSM.
Albert Schweitzer’s hotel room: To Oberholzer, November 15, 1921; to Martha Schwarz, December 7, 1921; WSI Sophie Koller. Rorschach sent Burri further details (November 5, 1921): “Every color, down to the deepest dark blue, simply disgusts him. He is a rationalist through and through and yet he has become a missionary. He insists that the jungle Negroes know only the ‘eternal disgusting green’ of the jungle, and that they have never once had the chance to see red. Red birds, red butterflies, red flowers—there’s no such thing, he said when I asked. Finally he did have to admit, with amazement, that the Negroes did at least see red when they bashed someone’s head in or crushed their own finger.”
“There is a lot more”: To Roemer, June 18, 1921.
Chapter 12: The Psychology He Sees Is His Psychology
One patient: To Roemer, January 27, 1922; L, 403n1; PD, 207.
“dynamic psychiatry”: Ellenberger’s Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry is the authoritative account; definitions of dynamic on 28
9–91.
one of these virtuosic performances: PD, 184–216, included in second and all later editions. Quotes below are from 185 (Oberholzer’s prefatory note) and 196–214 unless noted.
“the Rorschach test must be liberated”: Roemer, Vom Rorschachtest zum Symboltest, quoted in L, 166n1.
“more complicated and structured”: To Roemer, March 22, 1922, quoted in chap. 10 above.
“My images look clumsy”: To Roemer, January 27, 1922. Roemer’s embittered late years, after episodes of Nazi collaboration, were spent trying in vain to get recognition in Germany and America: despite decades of efforts, he could not find a publisher, eventually self-publishing his images in 1966. He continued to play up his three years of supposed “close daily collaboration” with Rorschach, and laid claim to the mantle of Rorschach’s legacy, but at the same time constantly undermined Rorschach’s own ideas and mischaracterized the test.
“The essential thing”: To Roemer, January 28, 1922.
Jung’s Psychological Types: Collected Works, vol. 6, 1976. Freud received a copy and called it “the work of a snob and a mystic, no new idea in it” (to Ernest Jones, May 19, 1921, in The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908–1939 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993], p. 424).
“Jung is now on his fourth version”: To Roemer, June 18, 1921.
“hardly anything in common”: PD, 82. Rorschach’s use of introversion and extraversion goes back to his sect studies; his successive understandings of Jung’s ideas about introversion are a complicated development, which no one has clearly tracked (both Akavia and K. W. Bash, “Einstellungstypus and Erlebnistypus: C. G. Jung and Hermann Rorschach,” JPT 19.3 [1955]: 236–42, and CE, 341–44, lacked access to some sources).
The Inkblots Page 43
