Tell Me What You See: The Rorschach Test and Its Inventor
It is the fortunes of this humdrum test that Damion Searls charts in his impressively thorough, if somewhat dry book. “The Inkblots” is part biography of Hermann Rorschach, psychoanalytic supersleuth, and part chronicle of the test’s afterlife in clinical practice and the popular cultural imagination.
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Rorschach, a young psychiatrist with the tousled rom-com looks of Brad Pitt, was working with deeply disturbed patients in a remote Swiss asylum during the golden years of psychoanalysis. Across the Alps, Freud was busy delving into the ids of rich Viennese housewives using an early version of talk therapy. But Rorschach speculated that in understanding the human psyche, what we see might be as important as what we say. A gifted amateur artist, he created the inkblots to see if his patients’ differing styles of perception could help parse out the differences between various pathologies.
Early results were promising. Schizophrenics responded differently to the blots than manic-depressives, and both responded differently than the people who were “normal” controls. Before long, Rorschach was using the test to diagnose psychiatric illnesses and predict personality traits, claiming that he got it wrong less than 25 percent of the time.
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Rorschach died suddenly in his mid- 30s, but his inkblots had already captured the imagination of both experts and the general public. The rest of the book charts that history.
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While most of us stare at Rorschach tests and see life reflected back at us, Searls apparently looks at life and sees Rorschach tests staring back at him. His inventory of Rorschach sightings in popular culture over the last half-century is encyclopedic. But outside of journalistic cliché, many of the examples he gives feel relatively marginal, more a series of isolated occurrences than a genuine cultural pattern.
More significant was the test’s impact on clinical practice. At its peak, the Rorschach was used an estimated million times a year, in murder trials and child custody battles, psychiatric diagnoses and college admissions and job applications.
It is only toward the end of “The Inkblots” that Searls introduces research showing that when it comes to predicting human behavior, the Rorschach performs no better than chance. Up until this point, he treats the question of whether the test actually works or not as almost an incidental one, an abstract curiosity in his cultural history.
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But this is a mistake. Psychology’s reputation has suffered body blows in recent years, with an epidemic of overclaiming among psychologists, widespread lapses in scientific rigor and the suggestion that only around a third of psychological findings across the board can actually be replicated. In this context, the question of the Rorschach’s basic validity is not an interesting aside, but fundamental to the entire story.
Searls, a journalist and translator, is a nuanced and scholarly writer, at his best dealing with philosophical abstractions. His passages on the nature of empathy, for example, are genuinely fascinating. But he is less strong on the human side of storytelling. While he goes into rigorous detail about the technicalities of the Rorschach and the infighting among psychologists, his book largely ignores the people at the sharp end, the patients and ordinary folks whose lives have sometimes been cataclysmically affected by the results of the test.
Although he refers to a couple of these “case studies” in passing in the final chapters of the book, their stories are told at a remove, as examples drawn from textbooks rather than key players in the narrative. It’s not clear that he interviewed many of these people directly (or if he did, those encounters haven’t been included in the finished text). In an insightful moment, Searls acknowledges that the Rorschach encourages experts to believe that they can speak for people better than the people can speak for themselves. But he falls into the same trap.
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Prioritizing the human beings impacted by this history would have made not only for a more readable book, but also a more responsible one. But, to belabor the Rorschach metaphor one last time, Searls should take comfort in the knowledge that any small criticisms I may have almost certainly say more about me than they do about his book.
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