Many years ago, shortly after the end of the war, I was subjected (or, rather, I subjected myself: almost voluntarily) to a battery of psychological tests. Without much conviction, if not in fact reluctantly, I’d applied for a job with a large manufacturing company. I needed a job, but I didn’t care for large companies; I felt quite ambivalent, and I both feared and hoped that my application would be rejected. I received an invitation to undergo “a number of exams,” accompanied by the proviso that the result of these exams would have no effect on the decision whether or not to hire me, but would prevent “a round man from being put into a square hole.” This vivid image had astonished me and stimulated my curiosity: I was younger than I am now, and I liked new things. Let’s try, and see how it goes.
In the waiting room, I found myself in the company of thirty or so other candidates, almost all male, almost all young, almost all anxious. We underwent a hasty medical examination and a careless clinical interview; it all brought back unpleasant memories of the ceremony, in truth far more brutal, that a few years earlier had marked my entrance into the concentration camp—as if a stranger were peering inside you to see what you contain and how much you’re worth, as one does with a box or a bag.
The first test consisted of drawing a tree. I hadn’t drawn a thing since elementary school. However, a tree has certain specific attributes; I included them all and handed in my drawing. It couldn’t have been more treelike.
The next test was more challenging: a young man with a dubious expression on his face handed each of us a booklet that contained 550 questions, each to be given a simple yes-or-no answer. Some of the questions were stupid, others were extraordinarily indiscreet, while still others seemed to have been badly translated from a poorly understood language. “Do you sometimes think that your problems can be solved by suicide?” Maybe they can, maybe they can’t, but I’m certainly not going to tell you about it. “In the morning, do you have a sensation of tenderness on the top of your head?” No, I really don’t. “Do you have, or have you ever had, problems with micturition?” The man at the neighboring desk was from Taranto, and he elbowed me and asked, “Friend, what is this mixturition?” When I explained, he brightened. “Do you believe that a revolution can improve the current political situation?” What kind of a fool do you take me for! I’m no revolutionary, but even if I were. . . .
The young man exited the room with his stack of booklets, and a girl came onstage, a brunette who was unmistakably younger than the youngest man there. She told us to come, one by one, into her office, which was nearby. When my turn came, she showed me four or five cards on which enigmatic scenes were printed, and she asked me to express freely the sensations that they prompted in me. One picture showed an empty rowboat, without oars, tipped on its side and abandoned in a patch of bushes and trees. I told her that our old housekeeper, whenever we asked her, “How’s it going?” would always reply disconsolately, “Like a boat in the woods,” and the young woman seemed satisfied.
Another card showed a few peasants fast asleep, stretched out on the ground amid haystacks, their hats pulled down over their faces; to me they suggested thirst, exhaustion, and well-earned if temporary rest. A third drawing featured a young woman crouching at the foot of a bed in a forced and unnatural position, her head tucked between her shoulders and her back curved, as if she were trying to use her back as a suit of armor against something or someone; on the floor was an indistinct object that could have been a gun. I can’t remember the subjects of the other drawings; I liked that work of interpretation, and it made me feel comfortable, and the girl told me that she had noticed it, but she said nothing else and ushered me into the adjoining room.
Here, seated at a desk, was a stylish and very beautiful young woman. She smiled at me as if she’d known me for years, and asked me to sit down across from her. She offered me a cigarette and then began asking me a series of technical, personal, and intimate questions, the kind that confessors ask during confession. She was especially interested in the feelings I had for my mother and father: she persisted with these to an annoying extent, but without ever relaxing her professional smile.
Now, at the time I’d already read my Freud and I didn’t feel completely unprepared. I acquitted myself with distinction; in fact, I even dared to tell the lovely woman that it was too bad we had so little time, otherwise we might be able to arrive at the transference and I could ask her out to dinner, but she cut me off, with a look of annoyance. At this point, I was really starting to enjoy myself: my anguish at feeling that I was being weighed and probed had vanished.
Then came another small room with another examiner: this woman was older than her colleagues and also more arrogant. She wouldn’t even look me in the eye as she spread out the ten figures of the Rorschach test before me. These are large shapeless but symmetrical blobs, obtained by folding in half a blank sheet of paper with black or colored splotches of ink in the middle: at first glance they might look like pairs of gnomes, or skeletons, or masks, or insects seen under the microscope, or birds of prey; at a second glance they no longer mean anything. Apparently, the way subjects interpret them provides clues to their overall personality. Now, it just so happened that a few days earlier a friend of mine had told me about these figures, and he’d also lent me the handbook that comes with them, and which explains with an abundance of curious details how to interpret their interpretation; that is, what is hidden inside someone who sees a skull in the blobs or, instead, an orchid. It struck me as ethical to inform my examiner that this test would be contaminated.
I told her, and she swelled up with fury. How dare I commit such a transgression? It was unheard of: these were confidential matters, private, and civilians had no right to pry into them. Their profession was a sensitive one, and no one else should try to poach on it. Most important, though: now what was she going to write in my file? She certainly couldn’t leave it blank. In other words, I’d put her in an impossible situation. I took my leave with some vague excuse, and filed the matter away; when the letter arrived offering me the position, I replied that I’d already taken another job, which was the truth.
A few months later, I happened to learn that the real candidates weren’t the thirty of us but them, the test givers: they were a team of psychologists on probation, and the tests they were administering constituted their first job, what apprentice craftsmen call their “masterpiece.”
Since then, I’ve never again been subjected to tests of this kind, and I’m glad. I mistrust them: it seems to me that they violate certain fundamental rights of ours, and that, moreover, they’re useless, because there is no longer such a thing as a virgin candidate. But I like them when they’re taken playfully: then they’re stripped of their presumptuousness, and they even stir the imagination, giving rise to new ideas, and can teach us something about ourselves.