Volume 51, Number 12 · July 15, 2004
Out, Damned Blot!
By Frederick C. Crews
What's Wrong with the Rorschach?: Science Confronts the Controversial Inkblot Test
by James M. Wood, M. Teresa Nezworski, Scott O. Lilienfeld, and Howard N. Garb
Jossey-Bass, 446 pp., $24.95
'It's a Rorschach.' That bit of everyday speech, referring to any equivocal stimulus that elicits self-betraying interpretations on all sides, is one sign among many that, in the popular mind at least, the vaunted inkblot challenge has no rival as psychology's master test. In actuality, the Rorschach is now administered for diagnostic purposes somewhat less frequently than the low-maintenance, question-and-answer Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), which asks the subject to agree or disagree with such flatfooted assertions as 'I often feel sad.' But neither the public nor Ror-schachers, as the zealous and clannish guardians of the blot technique are known, take much interest in 'superficial' self-report tests such as the MMPI. The mind's hidden layers, it is assumed, can be tapped only through unguided responses to images lacking determinate content; and the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach's ten cards with bisymmetrical shapes, introduced to an initially unimpressed world in 1921, are thought to have confirmed their uncanny power in countless applications.
Review, 4221 words
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