Rorschach: twenty years after.

Abstract

believe that promising possibilities are inherent in the Rorschach technique. With the passing of years, their number has increased so that "Rorschach" has become a familiar term in the idiom of psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, teachers, social workers, and even judges-in fact, among nearly all who treat human beings and their personality problems. In the last decade, hardly a book, article, or review pertaining to personality in any language or in any country omits mention of the Rorschach technique (Allport,

Seeing inside the child: The Rorschach inkblot test as assessment technique in a girls’ reform school, 1938–1948.

“…While the Rorschach test was not well known at first, it became widely used in Switzerland in the decade after its publication and spread to many countries, including Germany, England, the Netherlands, and the United States (Hertz, 1941, p. 532; Krugman, 1940, pp. 93–98; Van Drunen & van Strien, 1995, p. 29).…”

“…While Meyknecht did not state precisely how this other data was to be interpreted and transformed into an image of the personality, other practitioners were more specific. According to U.S. psychologist Marguerite Hertz, the information the Rorschach provided had to be “projected against” all sorts of other information, including “family background, education, training, health history, past life, qualitative judgments of the examiner and of other people, and other clinical and test data” (Hertz, 1941, p. 538). All of this data, together, was then interpreted in terms of the examiner’s experiential knowledge of the dynamics of human behavior.…”

The Present Status of the Rorschach in Clinical and Experimental Procedures*

“…• Read in part before the Ohio Psychological Association, 1947 sconng, and interpreting the test are becoming more diversified rather than more standard It seems wise at this time with the spreading interest m the Rorschach to take stock of the great accumulation of literature on the Rorschach, to evaluate it critically as we do our other psychological tools to determine both its value and limitations in clinical and experimental procedures Summaries of Rorschach studies by Hertz (7) and White (14) are available RELIABILITY A compilation of the estimates of reliability accumulated by spht-half and test retest methods range from 00 to 94 (5,9). In general they throw little light on the validity of the test as a whole Low reliabilities may be discounted on the basis of the fact that it IS impossible to make equivalent halves, and m retest situations, because of the change in set of the subject and his earlier expenence with the test, the second test situation is different from the first It IS sometimes true, however, that the same people who discount low rehabilities for this latter reason also claim that the Rorschach can be given over and over again to the same person, even when he has knowledge of the test purpose, and still be equally valid on each administration On the other hand high reliabilities may be discounted, as the subjective bias of the experimenter is not always contrdled and the reliability is more likely to deal with totals of a few scores than with interpretations As a matter of fact, when subjective methods of scoring are used, what is of greater importance than the usual measures of reliability is the lnterscorer or between-scorer reliabihty, both of scoring and interpretation Krugman (9) has shown that two individuals trained together over a period of years may obtain similar interpretations from a series of Rorschach records It remains to be discovered what the interscorer reliability is for individuals who have had little personal contact and various degrees of expenence, and who follow different variants or schools of the basic method VALIDITY To some individuals whose claim to distinction is their skill as Rorschach experts, to question the validity of the test is a waste of time They accept uncritically the original work of Rorschach, although it was not a controlled experiment but an exploratory, clinical approach Much of the ongmal theory behind the Rorschach was reasoning by analogy, and careful follow-up of this analogical reasoning m published studies indicates that much of it is fallacious For example, Rorschach says most people attend to the black part of the cards, those who do not, tend to be negativistic, stubborn, and eccentric (12, p 39) "If more than one white space response is found, abnormality should be suspected "…”