CHAPTER 1
Hermann Rorschach an Introduction
Hermann Rorschach- Artist and Creator of Inkblots:
The users of Rorschach Technique would be interested to know about the pioneer of Inkblot test: Hermann Rorschach. The technique that he developed in a relatively very short time has become an important instrument. The Rorschach Psychodiagnostic technique involves the person’s perception projected on ten inkblots. He believed that his inkblot method would help in assessing various characteristics of a person such as introversion, extroversion, intelligence, emotional stability, and problem-solving abilities. The test is being used in clinical settings, army, business organization, prisons worldwide.
Hermann Rorschach was born on November 8, 1884, in Zurich, Switzerland. He was the oldest of the three children of Ulrich Rorschach, an art teacher in Zurich schools; he also had a sister named Anna and a brother named Paul. His father's artistic interests may have been behind the young Rorschach's fascination with inkblots in his childhood. The boy's preoccupation with these random designs earned him the nick name "Klex," meaning ink blots in German," from his classmates at school. In his adolescence Rorschach lost his mother when he was 12 and his father died when he was 18. A year after his father's death, he graduated from the local high school with honors and had obtained top marks in all disciplines. He took a great interest in drawing, being an artist of some merit. Towards the end of his schooling in Schaffhausen he wrote to Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) - the famous advocate of Darwin's evolutionary theory - asking him whether he should go into further studies of art or natural sciences. Haeckel advised the latter, so in 1904 he entered medical school in Zurich. He spent time at a number of medical schools - in Neufchatel, Zurich, and Bern in Switzerland and Berlin in Germany - completing his studies in Zurich after five years. While in medical school in Zurich, he was a top student. Eventually he became close to Eugene Bleuler who influenced his views on “Schizophrenia” while working with him in a psychiatric ward of the university hospital. He graduated in medicine in 1909. Rorschach earned his doctor of medicine degree from the University of Zurich in 1912.
From 1909 to 1913, Hermann worked as an assistant in the psychiatric hospital in Münsterlingen, Switzerland and also prepared his doctoral thesis, "On Reflex-Hallucinations and Kindred Manifestations." He conducted some early experiments on children and adults in which he compared verbal associations with associations aroused by inkblots. He developed an interest in psychoanalysis about 1911, the date of his first publication. He contributed short articles, reports, and book reviews to the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse from 1912 to 1914.
In 1910 he married Olga Stempelin, a Russian woman living in Switzerland. Rorschach’s first child, Elizabeth, was born in 1917 and the second child, Wadin, in 1919. The following year, he and his wife accepted posts at a mental institution in Moscow, Russia where they remained for one year. In 1914, Rorschach secured a job as a resident physician at the Waldau Mental Hospital in Bern, Switzerland. Towards the end of 1915 he was appointed associate director of the asylum at Herisau, Switzerland. He remained here until his last days. In 1919, when the Swiss Society of Psychoanalysis was founded by Oskar Pfister and Emil and Mira Oberholzer, Hermann was one of its eight members, and served as vice-president. He practiced psychoanalysis with a small number of patients. A selection of Rorschach's articles was published in Germany in 1965.
Development of Rorschach Inkblot Test:
In 1911 Rorschach had begun experimenting on the clinical potential uses of inkblots in determining personality traits. This expanded on his earlier studies using schoolchildren as subjects during his medical training at the University of Zurich. He had also benefited from having read about the inkblot research of Justinus Kerner and Alfred Binet. He noted that they had not developed a consistent method of administering and evaluating inkblot test. Consequently he started collecting data on inkblots on patients in the mental hospitals where he was employed as well as healthy, normal people. Based on the information he gathered, he was able to devise a system of inkblot testing that he hoped would provide more systematic way of understanding a person's personality traits.
He developed more interest in the inkblot test when he saw Hens in 1917 published a doctoral thesis on an inkblot test he had devised with Eugen Bleuler. Hens' technique was to study the fantasies of his subjects using inkblot cards, similar to the one applied by Rorschach in 1911. This led Rorschach to resume his own experiments in 1918. He used altogether 40 cards, but 15 of them more often than the rest. He collected the responses from 305 persons (117 non-patients and 188 schizophrenics). He showed them inkblot cards and asked the question: "What might this be?" Their responses enabled him to distinguish among his patients on the basis of their perceptive abilities, intelligence, and emotional characteristics.
Several of Rorschach's colleagues, seem to have been very positive to his work and encouraged him to publish his findings. His manuscript containing the original version of the test, consisting of 15 cards, was sent to six publishers - who all refused it. Eventually Rorschach in Bern found a publisher who was willing to print the book - on the condition that the numbers of cards were reduced to ten. In June 1921 the book was finally printed, but the printing quality of the inkblot cards was anything but satisfying. They had been reduced in size, the colors had been altered and the original patches of uniform color density had been reproduced with a varying degree of saturation. In this way a very important variable was included in the text, the so-called shading qualities of the pattern. It is these ten cards that are presently being used and are known as the Rorschach test.
By 1922, however, the ideas in Rorschach's book “Psychodiagnostik” had become the subject of some discussion. However, most psychiatrists remained wary of his new methods. They did not believe that the Inkblot procedure could yield useful results. Although they acknowledged the potential value for the free-association thought that the inkblots generated. Yet, eventually, to later psychologists his book represented a masterpiece. During Rorschach’s life, the publication was a total disaster, since the entire edition remained unsold. More those few, who showed some interest, were hostile in their criticisms. The publisher, Bircher, went bankrupt shortly afterwards.
As might be expected, this was quite stressful to Rorschach and he became somewhat depressed. However, in spite of that he continued his work which he reported in a lecture to the Swiss psychoanalytic society in February 1922. Rorschach outlined his plans to improve upon his inkblot system, but this work was never completed. He did not live to see the great success that his testing methods would enjoy. On April 1st, 1922, Hermann Rorschach was hospitalized after a week of abdominal pains, probably caused by a ruptured appendix that he initially ignored. An explorative laparotomy was performed, but the condition proved to be inoperable, and Rorschach died of peritonitis at the age of 37 the following day.
Five years after his death, another publisher, Hans Huber decided to publish Psychodiagnostics. Even today, each reprinting of the plates themselves requires great attention, virtually identical reproduction of the originals. Rorschach cards have a different symmetrical inkblot pattern. The five cards are in black and white, two are primarily black and white with some color, and remaining three are in color. The subject is instructed to describe what he or she sees in the inkblot. The responses are analyzed according to different areas such as the reaction time, content, originality, and the subject's attention to color, shading, and form. Rorschach considered the inkblot test a kind of mirror, in which the inkblots constituted optical stimuli which mentally activated kinesthetic pictures which are then projected back as verbal responses to cognitively processing inkblots. The principles underlying the technique are based upon the viewer’s tendency to project idiosyncratic interpretations/ emotions when viewing ambiguous visual stimuli. From these keys trained observers may be able to pinpoint the responder’s inner impulses and personality traits.
After his death, the Rorschach test won acceptance gradually. By 1930 it was known in the United States. It gradually gained popularity internationally. The Rorschach Institute was founded in New York in 1939. In the United States, although the test was widely criticized from 1950s and remains a controversial assessment tool, yet, a research publication by Reynolds & Sundberg (1976) ranked the Rorschach test as number one. They based their findings on Buros Mental Measure Year Book. Though there is no dearth of those who have criticized it on the basis of validity and reliability issues. Yet it still occupies a prominent position as a diagnostic procedure in clinical settings. Some clinicians found helpful the computer scoring of data. However, such approaches mathematically fail to evaluate enriching symbolic responses which often surface during Content Analysis.