Rorschach Test

   Hermann Rorschach (1884–1922) grew up in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, and studied medicine in Zurich under Eugen Bleuler; as a student he was befriended by the artist Konrad Gehring and conceived the idea of determining whether successful students had a richer fantasy life than less successful. To this end, he prepared a number of ambiguous inkblots and quizzed his fellow students about them. After graduating in 1909, he became a staff physician at various Swiss asylums, ending finally at Herisau asylum in Appenzell Canton. After 14 years of experimentation at these institutions, with 300 psychiatry patients and 100 normal controls, in 1921 he published his famous projective test, limited by the publisher to 10 inkblots: Psychodiagnosis: Methods and Results of Diagnostic Experiments in Perception (Interpretation of Random Forms) (Psychodiagnostik. Methodik und Ergebnisse eines wahrnehmungsdiagnostischen Experiments [Deutenlassen von Zufallsformen]). Rorschach was also a psychoanalyst, in these years of febrile interest in psychoanalysis under Bleuler at the Burghölzli, and later became founding vice-president of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society. Rorschach’s inkblot test (Formdeutversuch) became the most frequently used individual test in American psychiatry and psychology. Five of the blots were in black and white, five included color. The test was believed to be of use in the diagnosis of mental illness on the basis of psychoanalytic criteria: patients project their needs onto the blots, revealing their internal psychodynamics. (Patients who saw "a bat" in form I, for example—and who identified the bat’s "anus" on the blot—were often thought "paranoid.") The test could be scored, the number of "P" responses, for example, showing the extent to which the patient was still in contact with reality. With the arrival of more objective tests for measuring personality such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) (first published in 1940 but popular only with the second edition in 1951), the Rorschach test went somewhat out of fashion. It was also shaded by the advent in 1980 of DSM-III, with its "operational criteria" for making such diagnoses as schizophrenia.