Rorschach “test”

Probably more correctly “Rorschach projective test”. The use of a standard set of ten images that are inkblots to which the participant is asked to describe what they see, think or feel in relation to the images. As with most projective tests the idea is that the responses will reveal processes in the participant’s mind of which they are unconscious.

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Essentially invented by a Swiss psychologist, Hermann Rorschach in 1921. Became very widely used worldwide by the 1960s but has since fallen dramatically in popularity as, I think, has the whole idea of projective tests offering profound insights into aspects of a person’s psyche of which they were unconscious.

There are formal coding systems, particularly the Exner system, but I really don’t know about them.

Certainly to me, as someone who does believe in the basic psychoanalytic idea of the dynamically, i.e. actively, repressed processes of that “Unconscious” or that “system unconscious” that idea that just showing someone images and expecting to cut through to repressed processes and contents is completely misunderstanding just how active their protection from conscious inspection is. Whether such “tests” can start conversations, perhaps help a person and a sympathetic and interested listener start to open up discussions of much less actively repressed aspects of a personality, but ons still not generally recognised by the person is another matter and I guess I think that’s not implausible. However, I have no personal experience of using these methods.

I do have a concern about the argument that such methods are simply worthless as I suspect that comes from a tradition, both in psychology and in statistics and psychometrics, that is really only interested in commonalities, processes we all have. Perhaps Rorschach and Exner believed that using the ink blot cards reveal such general things, however, it seems more likely to me that the cards at least, introduced sympathetically, are more likely to elicit idiosyncratic things, individuality. If so, the conventional statistical and psychometric methods are testing for something quite different and you should be exploring the information gains from projective tests with idiographic statistical methods such as my beloved method of derangements!

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Not covered in the OMbook.

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It’s a bit tangential but one of my shiny apps will derange a set of objects, say responses to Rorschach tests from different people so that you could apply the method of derangements. That’s here: https://shiny.psyctc.org/apps/random1/.