Status Updates From The Inkblots: Hermann Rorsc...

“People still widely think of [the Rorschach] as a way to generate ‘projections’. A test of seeing does far more, though. It reveals a person’s grasp on reality, cognitive functioning, susceptibility to emotions. It shows how she approaches a task and gives her a chance to connect with an empathetic therapist and heal. Like any act of seeing, taking the Rorschach is a combination of shaping, thinking, and feeling.”

“The MMPI’s (=Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) basis in self-reporting is both its strength and its weakness. Such tests show how you try to present yourself. The strength and weakness of the Rorschach is that it sidesteps these conscious intentions. You can manage what you want to say, but you can’t manage what you want to see.”

“Rorschach was criticized for various failings but praised as having been right about the connection between personality and perception (...)”

“Trying to decide whether the Rorschach is valid is like looking at a Rorschach Inkblot. The results from research are ambiguous just as Rorschach Inkblots are ambiguous. Different people look at the research and see different things.”

The Nazi Rorschachs & Stanley Milgram:
“These developments dealt a devastating blow to the status of psychological tests such as the Rorschach. There was no common ground to label evil as evil, no basis for moral judgment that everyone would accept.”

“If, as has been assumed, there are intimate connections between the organization of personality and cultural patterns, (...) it follows that changes in culture might be expected to produce changes in personality.”

In his diary, on January 28, 1920: “Again and again we run into the fact that introverts cannot understand how extraverts think and behave, and vice versa. And they don’t even realize that they are dealing with a different kind of person.”

Further connecting art and psychology.

• Freud => modern psychology.
• Vischer => modern art.

• “Abstraction is introverted, turning away from the world; empathy is extraverted, entering into the world. It would take Rorschach - an artist and psychiatrist studying the psychology of perception - to fully bring the strands together”

Freud wanted to get at the underlying psychological content of dreams, starting from their bizarre, seemingly meaningless surface, he needed to know how that underlying content was being “condensed” or transformed. Then he could follow the dream upstream to the source. Vischer, in contrast, values these transformations in their own right, as the basis for empathy, creativity and love.

See — think — feel:
• “The ability to see and shape the world, like the Mediterranean peoples; to think the world, like the Germans; but to feel the world, like the Slavs—will these powers ever be brought together?”
• “Russianness, for Rorschach, meant feeling: being in touch with strong, genuine emotions.”

I want to read people. (...) the most interesting thing in nature is the human soul