[Lee Jong-gil's Autumn Return] What Do You See in This Ink Stain?

Damien Suls' "Rorschach: Reading the Human Mind Through Ink Blots"
10 Ink Blot Cards Created 100 Years Ago Still Used in Psychological Tests
A Biography of Rorschach Who Passed Away at 37 Without Completing Follow-up Research

Inkblot card number 3 created by Hermann Rorschach. By interpreting the abstract ink patterns as they come to mind, one can estimate the personality of the examinee. Most people respond that it looks like two men wearing formal dress hats bowing to each other in greeting.

In the spring of 1986, a woman named Rose Martelli divorced a man named Donald Bell. Martelli was pregnant at the time. When their son was born, Bell filed a lawsuit for custody and visitation rights. Martelli countered by claiming that Bell had been violent during their marriage. She also testified that Bell’s 8-year-old daughter from a previous marriage had been sexually abused. The judge found the timing of the allegations suspicious and ruled that Bell had custody and visitation rights.

Every time the son returned from visiting his father, he had bruises. Martelli could not find conclusive evidence but insisted that the child was being abused. The Child Protective Services (CPS) required both Martelli and Bell to undergo psychological evaluations. The results showed Bell was normal, whereas Martelli was diagnosed with severe emotional disorders.

CPS advised Martelli to drop the lawsuit and seek treatment. Later, the son complained that his father hit him and even poked his buttocks. The swab test for sexual assault came back positive. A belated child abuse psychological investigation uncovered numerous pieces of evidence supporting the testimonies of Martelli and her daughter.

CPS’s misjudgment stemmed from blindly trusting the initial psychologist’s report. Another psychologist was shocked that Martelli was diagnosed with emotional disorders based on a single test. That test was the Rorschach test.

The Rorschach test, devised by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884?1922), is a program that diagnoses personality through inkblots. The assessment is based on the assumption that an individual’s perception is linked to their personality. The theory is that various aspects of personality?such as inner impulses, motivations, and impulse control?are expressed in the process of perceiving unstructured inkblots.

The ten inkblot cards used to induce responses are still in use over 100 years later. New interpretive systems continue to be researched and developed, such as John E. Exner Jr.’s "Comprehensive System for the Rorschach" and Gregory J. Meyer’s "Rorschach Performance Assessment System."

Why did this validated test fail to penetrate the psyches of Martelli and Bell? They were evaluated using Exner’s Rorschach interpretation support program. When the examiner codes all the patient’s responses, the program calculates complex (Exner) scores and highlights deviations that significantly differ from statistical norms. It also outputs interpretive hypotheses in prose form. For example, it might say, "This person appears to suffer from low self-esteem and lack of self-confidence, believing they are inferior to others."

However, at that time, Exner’s scores had not been validated. Errors were rampant, such as labeling normal tests as abnormal or ignoring positive results. In Martelli’s test, problems also arose in interpreting the inkblot cards. Her response about seeing "the leftover Thanksgiving turkey" was judged as indicating obsessive and dependent tendencies. Martelli took the test in a near-starved state. It was one week after Thanksgiving, and leftover turkey was in her refrigerator. The examiner was completely unaware of this fact.

Originally, Rorschach did not consider inkblots as psychological tests. He called it an "experiment"?a study observing how people see things without any evaluation or constraints. He used inkblots to study the nature of perception. He focused not only on how much people see but also on how they see. He believed the answer to "Who are we?" depends more on "What we see" than on "What we say."

Rorschach created a systematic and flexible picture based on intuition, talent, trial and error, and the power of symmetry. However, he died at age 37 before completing follow-up research.

Published in the United States in 2017, "Rorschach" is the first biography of Hermann Rorschach. It reconstructs his life from limited records and letters. This brings us closer to the essence of the Rorschach test and explores the psychology of perception. Rorschach’s thoughts on inkblots are vividly revealed in a letter he sent to his friend, psychiatrist Georg Roemer.

"To determine the suitability of the inkblot experiment, the academic community must first gather a very large sample, then systematically and statistically examine all variance laws and correlations in detail. If done, it could be used as a differentiated aptitude test. Even so, it would not be a test to decide whether someone is fit to be a doctor or a lawyer. Rather, it would be suitable for deciding whether someone who intends to become a doctor should engage in basic medical science or clinical medicine. (...) Above all, a much more solid theory must underpin the experiment. It is wrong to make such significant decisions based on a test not supported by a very solid theory. Extensive research is needed for all this."

Because Rorschach died young, one important question remains unanswered: how do the ten inkblot cards elicit such rich responses? For the past 100 years, most psychologists have completely forgotten this fundamental question, which is the theoretical foundation. They have approached the Rorschach test merely as a means to induce responses.

The most valuable insight Rorschach awakened is that empathy is more important than words. Empathy is a reflexive hallucination and a power of insight. It requires perception as delicate and precise as imagination or any sense. To feel another person’s emotions, you must feel that person as they are. Rorschach might have answered this way: "You must see the world through that person’s eyes."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.