Rorschach built his inkblots to diagnose schizophrenia, not to read personalities
Hermann Rorschach drew several hundred inkblots himself and kept just ten. He meant them as a tool for spotting schizophrenia and was sceptical about using them as a general window into personality. That use only arrived in 1939, years after his death, and it made the test famous.
Rorschach, a Swiss psychologist, studied 300 psychiatric patients and 100 comparison subjects before publishing Psychodiagnostik in 1921. The book was hard to get into print, drew little notice, and he died the following year. The idea of reading character in ambiguous shapes was older, reaching back to Leonardo and Botticelli, and a 19th-century parlour game called Gobolinks turned inkblots into entertainment. A book of poems inspired by accidental blots, published by Justinus Kerner in 1857, may have influenced him. Rorschach's contribution was to make the approach systematic.
The ten cards each measure roughly 18 by 24 centimetres and are almost perfectly symmetrical, some in black and grey, others in colour. The curator of the Rorschach Archives in Bern has suggested they were chosen to be as ambiguous and conflicted as possible. Examiner and subject sit side by side so the tester cannot unintentionally cue answers. After a first pass, the person goes through the cards again, explaining where they saw each image and why. Whether someone rotates a card, or asks permission to, is noted too.
Oddly, what people see matters less than how they see it. Scorers weigh which part of the blot prompted an answer, whether shape or colour drove it, how long a response took and how common or original it was. Learning to administer the test takes a few months; interpreters often remain learners for years.
Criticism has dogged it throughout. John Exner's scoring system, built on research in the 1960s and 1970s, tried to make results more consistent, and it remains popular in the United States. Researchers still question the test's reliability between scorers, its validity and its use in court evaluations. The name itself is a registered trademark of the Swiss publisher Hans Huber.
Source: Rorschach test
