There are no wrong answers, but responses that are very unusual are thought to reflect possible psychological issues. Rorschach’s test is meant to reveal how a person processes information. The 10 blots are probably the “most analyzed paintings of the 20th century,” says Searls. Regardless of the scientific debate, the Rorschach test has left its mark on American culture. He chose to publish a few, as we are doing here. That’s a challenge Damion Searls faced as he wrote The Inkblots, the first biography of Rorschach. To preserve their utility as a diagnostic tool, psychologists don’t want them shown outside a clinical setting. The Rorschach cards and the order in which they’re presented to patients have never changed. But a major 2013 study published by the American Psychological Association found it more effective than previously believed in diagnosing mental illness. Traditionally, there are five response details that have often been associated with homosexuality. Critics called for a moratorium on its use. If the test person has too few sexual responses, it may indicate sexual frustration. In the second half of the century, trends like Freudian analysis fell out of favor, and the test became a synonym for pseudoscience. After being brought to Chicago, they spread quickly across the United States as a popular personality test.
Rorschach’s original 10 images were published in 1921, the year before his death. Asking people what they saw, he observed a correlation in responses from patients with schizophrenia and theorized that mental health could be assessed by how someone processes visual information. In a small town in Switzerland in 1917, psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach began carefully splattering paint on cards to study how the mind works. The Rorschach is a test which enables the psychological mechanisms of a person to be explored, both in their present functioning and in their mental.
This story appears in the September 2017 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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