Sign in with Facebook
“Rorschach knew Binet’s work and was familiar with Binet’s own inspiration—Leonardo da Vinci, who in his “Treatise on Painting” described throwing paint at a wall and looking at the stains for inspiration.”
― The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing
― The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing
“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”
― The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing
― 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”
― The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing
― 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.”
― The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing
― The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing
“Rorschach’s body could activate his vision: “When, for example, I am unable to call up Schwind’s painting Falkenstein’s Ride as a memory image but I know how the knight is holding his right arm (‘knowing’ here as a nonperceptual mental image), I can voluntarily copy the position of this arm, in my imagination or in reality, and this immediately gives me a visual memory of the picture that is much better than without this aid.” This was, he reiterated, precisely the same as what happened in his schizophrenic patients: by holding his arm the right way, he had “hallucinatorily called forth, so to speak, the perceptual components of the visual image.”
―
―
reader’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at reader’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
534 books
|
265 friends
20 books
|
62 friends
0 books
|
109 friends
3 books
|
84 friends
21 books
|
406 friends
0 books
|
39 friends
0 books
|
69 friends
1 book
|
291 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by reader
Lists liked by reader
