Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach dies. He leaves behind a widely known, but no longer widely used, test for diagnosing mental illness with inkblots.
Rorschach spent so much time drawing that his high school buddies nicknamed him Kleck, the German word for “inkblot.” (Hmm, Doktor, und vat do you make of that?)
Rorschach believed that what different people perceived in ambiguous inkblots would reveal differences in basic personality structure. He began showing inkblots to patients and asking, “What might this be?” It seems obvious today that someone who repeatedly sees people fighting in a series of inkblots might have a different mind-set from someone who sees dancing or sexual acts. Or that people who see people in the blots differ from those who always see birds or animals, or who see inanimate objects rather than living things. That general projective test might, however, indicate only a person’s momentary mood.
But Rorschach, with the characteristic inclination of a nation of watchmakers, set out to devise a precise system for scoring his test based on whether and how much a patient reported movement, color, and form. When his book Psychodiagnostics appeared, in 1921, it attracted little notice. But word spread, and the Rorschach test eventually joined the standard arsenal of shrinky examinations. New and complicated systems of scoring evolved, and competing schools of therapy vigorously disputed one another’s methods.
The scoring systems aren’t used much these days, but the inkblots became a staple of the popular-culture view of psychiatry and mental illness. They’ve appeared in countless films and TV shows, and even on the masked face of the character Rorschach in the graphic novel and movie Watchmen.
All this didn’t come in Rorschach’s lifetime. He died of appendicitis in 1922. He was only thirty-seven.—RA