Rorschach, Hermann

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Rorschach, Hermann

Hermann Rorschach, Swiss psychologist, was born in 1884 and died in 1922. These were the exciting years when psychoanalysis came of age and gave impetus to fresh inquiry in all social and cultural areas. In the psychology of the individual, psychoanalysis revealed hitherto unfathomed aspects of the emotions. Scientific psychology was thus faced with a new challenge, the measurement of unconscious emotions. Rorschach’s famous test met this newly felt need.

Rorschach, the first of three children, was born in Zurich. When he was two years old the family moved to Schaffhausen, a commercially busy and culturally stimulating city; his father became a drawing teacher there. His mother died when he was 12 and his father when he was 18. In his final year in the Kantonschule, undecided whether to choose a career in science or art, he wrote to the biologist Ernst Haeckel (O. Rorschach 1944; Morgen-thaler 1921), who advised him to go into medicine. He began his studies in Zurich and went successively to Berlin, to Bonn, then back to the University of Zurich, where he took his degree in 1912. His dissertation on hallucinations forecast his interest in psychopathology. The research was done under Eugen Bleuler’s supervision.

In 1910 Rorschach married Olga Stemplin, a Russian, who surely had something to do with his decision, in 1913, to take a post in a sanitarium near Moscow. It was his third journey to Russia, and Olga Rorschach has described (1944) his favorable reaction to the vastness of that country, to its people, its churches, and its landscape. He had learned Russian, and he wrote a novel (unpublished) about Pushkin and later planned a work on Dostoevski. After less than a year in Russia, he returned to Switzerland. He had held posts in three mental hospitals when he was appointed as assistant director in the cantonal institute in Herisau, and he remained in this position until he died of acute peritonitis in 1922. His one important professional office was that of vice-president, in 1919, of the then newly organized Swiss Psychoanalytic Society; Emil Oberholzer was the president. Some correspondence with Morgenthaler (1965) shows how strenuously Rorschach promoted psychoanalysis in Swiss medical circles.

Rorschach was undoubtedly supported in his psychoanalytic orientation by Bleuler, who was among the first to receive Freud’s ideas sympathetically. Jung, a resident in a suburb of Zurich, was giving impetus to experimentation with free association as well as to extraversion-introversion theory. Bleuler’s psychiatry and the theories of Jung and Freud were the three principal sources of the ideas that were to crystallize in Rorschach’s test. He used psychoanalytic theory in interpreting the test record of one of Oberholzer’s patients (Rorschach & Oberholzer 1923) and also in an article on two Swiss leaders of religious sects (1927), whom he had studied before he developed the test. In this paper he traced personality changes from the introversive to the extratensive type. He anticipated his own exposition in the Psychodiagnostics ([1921] 1942, pp. 102 ff.).

Rorschach’s test clearly reflects his particular scientific preferences, powerful as the influences of Freud, Jung, and Bleuler may have been. His basic method was empirical and his temperament that of the experimentalist. Rorschach himself so described his work in the brief foreword to the Psychodiagnostics: “The entire work is predominantly empirical in character” (1921). He offered suggestions for controlled experiments, especially with regard to those two critical variables—color, indicative of acted out feelings, and movement, indicative of ideas lived in the imagination, such as wish fulfillments or daydreams ([1921] 1942, p. 58). They are the main ingredients of his Erlebnis-typus, the core of his personality concept. The ratio between the number of movement responses and the weighted value of color responses is an index of the Erlebnistypus. The ratio can change, as can also the Erlebnistypus, with the increase or reduction of either color or movement responses.

Rorschach’s broad psychological interests are reflected in his penetrating studies of some Swiss religious sects. According to Morgenthaler (1965), he was striving for a synthesis of folkways, ethnology, religion, and psychopathology in a single sociological system. Some of his most important work was done on schizophrenia.

It is intriguing to apply his personality theories to what is known of Rorschach himself. Warmth of feeling for others was one of his traits, one that he acquired chiefly from his mother, a kindly and sociable person (Ellenberger 1954). To his father he owed his aptitude for drawing, and he encouraged his patients to draw. He had many acquaintances but only a few intimate friends. According to his own Erlebnistypus concept, he would thus be introversive. However, Olga Rorschach writes, “He was constantly growing, ever expanding his Erlebnistypus, from introversion towards extraversion. He thus attained to an enviable ambiequality” (1944). And she quotes Rorschach as saying that “the ideal is the ambiequal.”

Rorschach was a venturesome explorer, and in that most taxing terrain, the human personality. While he clung to the observable, he arrived at his conclusions more by his insights than by the logic of statistics. His short life did not permit him to complete his work. But as a tool for clinical exploration as well as for general research in personality, Rorschach’s test has gone far toward meeting the challenge faced by a science of psychology.

Samuel J. Beck

[For the historical context of Rorschach’s work, seePsychoanalysisand the biographies ofBleuler; Freud; Jung. For discussion of the subsequent development of Rorschach’s ideas, seeFantasy; Projective methods, especially the article onthe rorschach test.]

WORKS BY RORSCHACH

(1921) 1942 Psychodiagnostics. 3d ed. Bern: Heber; New York: Grime. ? First published in German.

(1923) 1924 Rorschach, Hermann; and Oberholzer, E. The Application of the Interpretation of Form to Psychoanalysis. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 60:225–248; 359–379. ? First published in German as “Zur Auswertung des Formdeutversuches fur die Psychoanalyse.” Reprinted in the 1942 edition of Rorschach 1921.

1927 Zwei schweizerische Sektenstifter. Imago 13:395–441.

1965 Gesammelte Aufsatze. Bern: Huber.