The ink blots have been used as a diagnostic tool for 100 years, but the making of new ones, every five years, has been a closely guarded secret – until now
Photograph: Jeremy Millar/The Guardian
Rorschach was not the first to consider the importance of these indeterminate forms, and in the newly developing science of psychology, ink blots were being used as prompts by which one might gauge a subject’s imagination. As a medical student, Rorschach came to use them similarly, showing psychiatric patients and young teenagers alike newly made blots and noting what they saw.
As well as the ink blots, Rorschach also had to design the “protocol” by which the subject’s responses were gathered and assessed, and here he adopted categories that seemed to relate to the avant-garde art of the period with which he was fascinated: Detail and Whole; Movement, Colour and Form. Each subject’s response was given a code that not only related to what they saw but alsothey saw.
As Rorschach understood, if the responses of different subjects are to be compared, then the thing to which they are responding must be the same, and given that this is a test that depends on visual acuity, then it must bethe same; “similar” is hardly a scientific category.
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