His obituary in 1903 reported that he had been depressed and delusional, and that his last years were filled with ‘unspeakable torments’.
In a gorgeous sanatorium by Lake Constance, he would complain to his colleagues that it was ‘the Germans’ duty to kill as many Frenchmen as possible, and the Frenchman’s duty to kill as many Germans as possible, while it’s our duty to sit here right in the middle and say “Good morning” to our schizophrenic patients every day.’ His father, Ulrich, was a painter who spent years writing a treatise on ‘the laws of form’, which he thought would apply to everything in nature, if only he could figure out what they were. Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss psychiatrist who started creating personality tests when he was bored during the First World War. People might be mysteries unto themselves, but anyone can be figured out. The Rorschach promised a short cut to the psyche, an ‘X-ray of the soul’. He thinks that the blots are beautiful – ‘not exactly art, but not not art either’ – and he’s interested in the modern testing industry, brought about by the Rorschach and predicated on the assumption that people are knowable, and that just by asking a few questions it’s possible to determine if someone is fit for promotion, or to be released from prison, or to lose custody of their children.
He’s a literary translator, not a psychologist, and he came to the test ‘from the cultural side’. Damion Searls, whose new book offers the first history of ‘probably the ten most interpreted and analysed paintings of the 20th century’, doesn’t argue, as others have, that the Rorschach is ‘the most powerful psychometric instrument ever envisioned’, but neither does he say that it’s hogwash.
Guides to the test had to be ‘kept secure’, and in pre-internet days, before all the cards went up on Wikipedia, the only way subjects could be sure that their answers wouldn’t signal mania or schizophrenia, inordinate anger or clinginess or depression, was by training to be Rorschachian analysts themselves. The Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, the Thematic Apperception Test, Myers-Briggs: all could be out-smarted, but even the most charming psychopaths were expected to give themselves away when they started talking about the inkblots. It was once supposed to be impossible to cheat on the test – that’s why psychologists used it.
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