Rorschach, Hermann (1884-1922)

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RORSCHACH, HERMANN (1884-1922)

Swiss psychoanalyst and creator of the projective test that bears his name, Hermann Rorschach was born in Zurich on November 8, 1884. He died in Herisau on April 3, 1922, probably from acute appendicitis, at the age of thirty-seven, nine months after publishing his seminal work, Psychodiagnostik.

From childhood Rorschach evinced considerable artistic skill and while in secondary school he hesitated between fine art, natural science, and medicine, opting finally for the latter. In Zurich, where Rorschach principally studied, Eugen Bleuler had created a revolution in hospital psychiatry by introducing Freud's theories, while his colleague, Carl Gustav Jung, had worked out a word association test on psychodynamic principles. Rorschach obtained his medical license in 1909 and his medical degree in 1912, from the University of Zurich.

From 1909 to 1913, Rorschach worked as an assistant in the psychiatric hospital in Münsterlingen, and there prepared his doctoral thesis, "On Reflex-Hallucinations and Kindred Manifestations." At the same time, he conducted some early experiments on children and adults in which he compared verbal associations with associations aroused by blots of ink, but did not elaborate on this work at the time. Rorschach developed an interest in psychoanalysis about 1911, the date of his first publication. He contributed short articles, reports, and book reviews to the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse from 1912 to 1914.

After visiting Russia in 1913, Rorschach returned to Switzerland to assume a position as assistant in Waldau, a psychiatric clinic near Bern; his main interest during this period were several unusual Swiss religious sects. In 1915 he was appointed associate director of the asylum at the small town of Herisau, where he would remain until his death.

While at Herisau, Rorschach rekindled his earlier interest in the use of inkblots in psychiatric diagnosis. Over the course of three years, beginning in 1918, he developed a series of cards through experiments with patients to develop a projective test that could indicate the presence of certain personality traits and characteristics. The Rorschach test is an example of a scientific advance due as much to artistic talent as to intellectual rigor.

Published in 1921, Psychodiagnostics was not yet a definitive text when Rorschach died the following year. The test won acceptance over time, and by the 1930s it had garnered considerable attention in the United States. The Rorschach Institute was founded in New York in 1939, and Henri Ellenberger, with his biographical essay in 1954, restored Rorschach's stature and significance. In the United States, although the test was widely criticized from the 1950s and remains a controversial assessment tool, a revision by John Exner in the 1970s brought the Rorschach renewed and continuing attention.

In 1919, when the Swiss Society of Psychoanalysis was founded by Oskar Pfister and Emil and Mira Oberholzer, Rorschach was one of its eight members, and served as vice-president. He practiced psychoanalysis with a small number of patients. Training analyses were not then required, and Rorschach himself was never analyzed. A selection of Rorschach's articles was published in Germany in 1965.

Mireille Cifali

See also: Psychological tests; Psychology and psychoanalysis; Switzerland (German-speaking).