Herman Rorschach - the developer of the Rorschach test - the ink blots in which everyone sees what they want

129 years ago today, Herman Rorschach was born, who developed the inkblot interpretation test named after him - the Rorschach test.

There is not one of us, at least among the adults among us, who has not come across various psychometric tests in the Rorschach blot test.

Herman Rorschach was born on November 8, 1884 in Zurich, Switzerland. The young Rorschach grew up in an extraordinary intellectual atmosphere in a home that was full of art and cultural connections. He studied medicine in Zurich, Nuremberg, Bern and Berlin. He was influenced by Sigmund Freud, when he specialized in psychiatry, Rorschach made contact with the prominent in the Swiss psychiatric community including Carl Jung. Jung pioneered the study of word association tests as a means of listening to subconscious materials, and Rorschach, like him, experimented with this procedure.

During his studies he met with who later became his wife Olga. At the end of 1913, Rorschach left his job at the Swiss mental hospital and moved with his wife to her native Russia, where he worked in a private clinic. However, in July 1914, Rorschach returned to Switzerland, where he served as an assistant manager at a regional mental hospital. His wife was unable to leave Russia due to the war and she only joined him in the spring of 1915 explaining that despite his love for Russia, he remained Swiss and European. During that time Rorschach developed an academic interest in the psychology of Swiss cults.

Man is the template of his native landscape and therefore the artistic background he received as a child, perhaps thanks to his father who was an art and painting teacher, brought him to the connection between the two. After many scientific articles he published on personality, his biggest publication came from his book "The Shape Interpretation Test" which was described in a book entitled Psycho-Diagnostics (Psychiatric Diagnosis) in which he described a shape interpretation experiment in which 405 volunteers participated.
Rorschach had many potential sources of inspiration. Alfred Bina, reported on experiments with ink blots as a test for the study of creativity as early as the beginning of the 20th century. Even earlier, in Germany, Justinus Kerner published the book - Kleksographien, which was composed of poems inspired by ink blots in 1857. Kerner, a doctor and painter, created random ink blots by folding pieces of paper on which ink was spilled. He then wrote poems, each of which was based on an inspiration he received from the inkblot. The printed book was well received in German speaking countries and was known to Rorschach.

Rorschach was impressed that the inkblots could be applied to obtain responses that stem from personal perception, which in turn depends on the basic structure of the personality. In the book Rorschach described only decisive factors such as movement, color and shape. Only in a follow-up article published only after his death, Rorschach stated that these factors were the result of a serendipitous misprint (sort of searching for Athens and finding the monarchy). Following Rorschach, assessment tests that used his method began to appear and, of course, a debate began on the question of which method is more useful.

A controversial test
Rorschach died a year after the publication of the book at the age of 38. The influence of his book on the world of psychiatry continues to this very day although naturally, like everything related to the early psychologists, it is subject to scientific controversy.
According to Wikipedia, the Rorschach test consists of ten cards, each of which has a symmetrical ink spot printed on it. Five of the spots are printed in shades of gray and black only, two of them also include red spots, and three are colored. The examiner shows the subject each card in order, and asks him to answer the question "What does it look like to you?" His responses are recorded in detail by the examiner. The second stage is the investigation stage - the subject is asked to explain and clarify each response he made in the first stage.

Opponents of the test claim that there is no explanation as to "how" such a process is carried out, in which a response to a meaningless stimulus leads to a significant insight into the person's personality. Some critics of the test claim that the examining psychologist also has his own personal implications for the dull stimulus of the inkblot. For example, the examiner checks to what extent it is possible to see in the stain what the subject said he saw, and it seems that this is subject to the subjective vision and judgment of the examiner himself. Proof of this was found in studies that showed that when the same test is interpreted by two different examiners, results are obtained that are not completely identical.

About six months ago, a debate erupted in the scientific community surrounding the uploading of all ten spots, the copyrights of which had expired to Wikipedia by James Heilman, an emergency room doctor from the province of Saskatchewan in Canada, who also added the common answers to each. in the article In "Haaretz".He is quoted as saying: "I wanted to raise the bar." The question of whether to leave one image on Wikipedia seemed absurd to me, so I uploaded all ten," Heilman said. "From there, the discussion exploded."

In response to the fact, psychologists took to Wikipedia to claim that the site jeopardizes one of the oldest and most consistently used psychological assessment tests.