Excursions in Rorschachlandia: Surveying the scientific and philosophical landscape of Hermann Rorschach's Psychodiagnostics

Abstract

This article examines the milieu of Hermann Rorschach's Psychodiagnostics (1921Psychodiagnostics ( /2021 under development between 1911 and his death in 1922 and explores new evidence about the direction Rorschach's test might have taken after publication of Psychodiagnostics. This includes direct and indirect influences from turn of the century K E Y W O R D S Hermann Rorschach, Ludwig Binswanger, psychiatry and philosophy, Rorschach historiography, swiss school of psychiatry 1 | INTRODUCTION This paper is written on the centenary of the publication of Hermann Rorschach's Psychodiagnostics (1921) and newly annotated 100th anniversary translation of Hermann Rorschach's Psychodiagnostics (Rorschach, 1921). The context of the paper is the recent English-translation and publication of the Rorschach-Binswanger correspondence in 1921-1922 and Ludwig's Binswanger's Comments on Hermann Rorschach's "Psychodiagnostics" (Acklin et al., 2021). Binswanger's Comments were initially presented to the Swiss Psychiatric Society in 1922, and later published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis in 1923. 1 , 2 This previously untranslated material opens a window on the early development and direction of Rorschach's inkblot test before, at the time of, and following his sudden death in 1922.Hermann Rorschach (1884Rorschach ( -1922 was born in Zurich, the oldest of three siblings, and spent his formative years in Schaffhausen. He was the son of an art instructor and educated in Schaffhausen. His mother died when he was 13, and his father remarried his late wife's younger sister. He obtained his diploma, ranked 4th in his class, from the Kantonschule Schaffhausen, known for "its efficient and capable teaching staff and its high scholastic standing" (Ellenberger, 1957, p. 195). He attended the University of Zurich Medical School from 1904 to 1909, completing his studies and qualifying in 1910, including studies at Neuenberg, Berne, and Berlin (Akavia, 2013). While he was a medical student, he attended lectures by C. G. Jung (1875-1961) and E. Bleuler (1857-1939 in Zurich, and later authored his doctoral thesis on reflex hallucinations in 1912 under Bleuler's supervision. 3 In 1910, he married his wife, Olga, also a psychiatrist. Following his matriculation, he worked in cantonal asylums in Muensterlingen until 1913 where he started his inkblot studies, spent a year in Russia, came back to Waldau asylum in 1915, and was appointed to the 300-bed Herisau asylum. Following his medical studies at the University of Zurich, Rorschach started his experimentation with inkblots with adults and children at Muensterlingen in 1911 with a schoolteacher and close friend from Schaffhausen, Konrad Gehrig (Searls, 2017). He laid aside his inkblots experiments in 1913 to work on other projects. At the end of 1917, he resumed his inkblot studies; the result of this work was published in 1921 as Psychodiagnostics.He was described as a devoted father to his two children and a skillful toy maker, draftsman, and illustrator.Rorschach was a prolific ...

Inkblots and the Life-World – Toward a Rorschach Phenomenology

“…Psychoanalysis would gain a dominant foothold in the treatment room and laboratory, as would the scientific classification of human behavior, traits, and tendencies, and Rorschach was influenced significantly by these movements (Acklin, 2022;Ellenberger, 1957Ellenberger, /2014Ellenberger, , 1970Keddy, 2022). This era in Switzerland was notable for its multidisciplinary and international collaboration as well as engagement with the arts and humanities.…”

“…The existing general experimental psychology was ill-equipped to deal with this challenge. (p. 258) Hermann Rorschach was certainly not the first to utilize inkblots for clinical or experimental purposes (see Acklin, 2022;Rorschach, 1921Rorschach, /2021). However, his set was the most painstakingly developed, a process described with compelling detail by Signer (2021).…”

“…It seems reasonable to state that Rorschach's attempt to capture his method/ experiment in terms that offered dialogue with his Swiss colleagues left him open to methodological and stylistic criticism (see Acklin, 2022, for examples of such critiques). He attempted to accomplish the above via observations that would capture both normative counts of participant perceptual processes across clinical/ diagnostic groups as well as to evoke individual differences, and he wrote only with scientistic language.…”

“…(pp. 188-189) Rorschach spent his later years not engaging Jung's analytical psychology project in psychoanalysis that emerged in Zurich proper but rather in the Freudian psychoanalytic and Swiss psychiatric societies, working most productively with colleagues in that orientation (Acklin, 2022). He was vice president to his colleague Emil Oberholtzer in the society and he published/presented on various subjects (Ellenberger, 1957(Ellenberger, /2014Rorschach, 1921Rorschach, /2021.…”

“…His primary engagement with phenomenological psychology was with Ludwig Binswanger , a crucial figure in translating ideas from existential phenomenology to clinical psychoanalytic practice. According to Ellenberger (1970), Galison (2004), and Acklin (Acklin, 2022;Acklin et al, 2021), Rorschach and Binswanger corresponded with each other, and he was open to ideas from the phenomenological tradition as a possible fixity for his methodological shortcomings. The citations for these claims have not been readily available due to previous translation absences.…”