Status Updates From The Inkblots: Hermann Rorsc...

Must.Finish.This.Book.This.Month

Once again disturbing, and at least once, funny. Disturbing due to the use of Rorschach testing on the Nazis standing trial at Nuremberg. Funny due of the other "untheorized" tests that it sprouted (including a "Cypress Knees Projective Test" for blind people!), parlor games and ads.

Fascinating and disturbing, in a way. After HR's death, the test gets out of hand. American psychologists/psychiatrists are interested in it, but then again so are anthropologists. Extremely freaky and shady, because the test is still not based on any coherent theory, but it somehow "works". Gets rebranded as a "projective test", and then extensively used in various settings.

T.T This second part of the book was (shall I say) infinitely better than the first. HR's interest for sects, his turbulent relationship with Olga, his (at times desperate) attempts to publish the test. His modesty, his hesitations, his efforts to ground the test scientifically, to give it a theory, his premature and stupid death, everything is ... heartbreaking :((( watch?v=pECQK8ImFeQ

So far, overly optimistic about the results of psychoanalysis and very positive about Rorschach. But even though HR is so interesting (especially due to his egalitarian views in respect to women and his love for Russian culture), he seems more like a marginal note to the huge psycho-playas of those times: Freud, Jung, and Bleuler. Let us see how this progresses. I had no idea that empathy was such a new word :O