![]() ![]() ![]() Several behaved like ‘bright and egotistical schoolboys’ once the tests started, delighted to be spoken to (their guards weren’t allowed to talk to them, even when delivering meals). Gilbert’s diary records their encounters with the twenty-four Nazi prisoners, who, stuck in their tiny cells for months on end, welcomed any engagement with other people. Kelley used Gustave Gilbert, the prison’s morale officer and a fluent German speaker, to help him administer the tests. As it happened, he was one of the authors of what was then the leading English-language manual for the Rorschach test. The prison psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, was asked to check this. As prominent Nazis waited in prison to be brought before the military tribunal and tried for ‘crimes against humanity’, the US authorities sought to make sure that they were mentally competent to stand trial. Its most intriguing use came in the context of the Nuremberg Trials of 1945. Rorschach’s Psychodiagnostics, first published in Switzerland in 1921, was translated into English and published in the USA in 1942. Ruth Benedict, one of this new discipline’s foremost proponents, viewed culture as ‘personality writ large’. Searls links this interest with the growth of anthropology in the 1930s. Rorschach died in 1922, but his tests outlived him and caught on particularly well in the USA (where personality definition and, arguably, simplification have always been popular). He then moved on to constructing a code, or protocol, to interpret his patients’ reactions. For instance, he showed them an inkblot that bore a strong resemblance to a bat, which they interpreted as ‘moving people’, giving him a clue to the pattern of their thought processes. He experimented with showing them his own drawings, forerunners of the later inkblots, and discovered how effective this visual approach was – the ‘power of seeing’, as Damion Searls puts it in the subtitle of his book. Here he tried to find ways to connect to his more difficult, often schizophrenic patients. Rorschach practised as a psychiatrist at Herisau, near St Gallen, and at the nearby Krombach psychiatric hospital. He had found these tests to be psychologically valuable, coining the term ‘complex’ as a result. Jung lectured on his word association tests, in which he used a stopwatch to measure the response time to a stimulus word. This clinic housed over a thousand patients and had acquired an international reputation for its enlightened and innovative methods, particularly the ‘affective rapport’ technique recommended by Bleuler. He studied medicine at Zurich University, where he was lectured by Carl Jung and by Eugen Bleuler, director of the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic near Zurich, where both worked. As a result, he acquired the nickname ‘Klex’, derived from the German word for blot. Their responses to the images are assessed according to several criteria, including level of detail, perceived content (such as a dancing bear) and the impression or otherwise of motion.īorn in 1884 near Zurich, Rorschach was a frequent doodler at school, taking after his father, who was a painter. Subjects are invited to view each inkblot and describe what they see. The same image can be replicated on both sides. In the Rorschach test, ‘ten and only ten’ inkblot patterns are used, reproduced on cards precisely 9½ inches high and 6½ inches wide. I n the early 20th century, the Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach devised a test for examining people’s personalities based on their responses to sets of inkblots.
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