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“It also comes as a surprise that the term was invented not to talk about altruism or acts of kindness, but to explain how we can enjoy a sonata or a sunset. Empathy, for Vischer, was creative seeing, reshaping the world so as to find ourselves reflected in it. In”
― Damion Searls, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing

“Vischer had the same kind of experiences, likewise anticipating Rorschach’s. “When I observe a stationary object,” Vischer wrote, “I can without difficulty place myself within its inner structure, at its center of gravity. I can think my way into it,” feel “compressed and modest” when I see a star or flower, and “experience a feeling of mental grandeur and breadth” from a building, water, or air. “We can often observe in ourselves the curious fact that a visual stimulus is experienced not so much with our eyes as with a different sense in another part of our body.”
― Damion Searls, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing

“Rorschach’s dissertation, which he finished in 1912, set out to define the physiological pathways that make empathy in Vischer’s sense possible. “On ‘Reflex Hallucinations’ and Related Phenomena” may be a brain-numbing title in English, but the subject was nothing less than the connection between what we see and how we feel. Reflexhalluzination was a technical psychiatric”
― Damion Searls, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing

“From Binet, the idea of measuring imagination with inkblots spread to a string of American intelligence-testing pioneers and educators—Dearborn, Sharp, Whipple, Kirkpatrick. It reached Russia as well, where a psychology professor named Fyodor Rybakov, unaware of the Americans’ work, included a series of eight blots in his Atlas of the Experimental-Psychology Study of Personality (1910). It was an American, Guy Montrose Whipple, who called his version an “ink-blot test” in his Manual of Mental and Physical Tests (also 1910)—this is why the Rorschach cards would come to be called “inkblots” when American psychologists took them”
― Damion Searls, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing