"The advantage is that it's very difficult to manipulate – unlike a questionnaire, for example, which you can try to spin," explains Nashat. The test is still widely used in clinical practice, forensic examinations and recruitment. Hermann Rorschach, who died at the age of 37, did not leave any definitive key to interpreting the test that bears his nameĪfter a somewhat frosty reception from his colleagues at the start, Rorschach's test gradually gained in popularity after his death, particularly after 1940 when it started to spread to all four corners of the world – most notably in the US, France and Japan. "Rorschach himself saw his test as a work in progress and warned against making hasty interpretations from using it," explains Jacques Van Rillaer, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Leuven in Belgium. But the young doctor didn't have long to continue his investigations – the following year, at the age of 37, he died suddenly from poorly-treated peritonitis, leaving behind his wife and two children and his life's work unfinished. Rorschach set out his method in his book Psychodiagnostik (Psychodiagnostics), which was published in 1921. By studying the different responses, Rorschach thought he could identify different pathologies and personality traits," adds Nashat. He used to test them out on young people who had been institutionalised and schizophrenics, asking them what they saw. They were the result of meticulous work, with Rorschach reworking every detail. ![]() "The inkblots used in the test weren't just created by chance. Rorschach created his test by developing around a hundred different studies of inkblots of varying degrees of complexity, but each one showing an (imperfect) mirror symmetry. What interested him was the ambiguous nature of such composite images, like a cat-frog or a squirrel-cockerel," explains psychologist Sadegh Nashat, a lecturer at the University of Geneva and authority on Rorschach's work, whose archives he has studied at the University of Bern. During his time in Russia, he collected newspaper drawings that often showed hidden elements behind the main image. "Hermann Rorschach had a keen interest in optical illusions. Since then, the Rorschach test has become known all over the world. As for Rorschach, whose father had been an art teacher, there was a considerable period of hesitation before he opted for a medical career over an artistic one. ![]() Rorschach's professor and PhD adviser was Eugen Bleuler, famous for having coined the term schizophrenia and been instrumental in introducing psychoanalysis to Switzerland. ![]() The Rorschach test was developed in Zurich and is named after the psychiatrist who invented it, Hermann Rorschach (1884–1922), who used to practice at the Psychiatric University Hospital Zurich, known as the Burghölzli.
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