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

Abstract

World War II has greatly stimulated the study of the Rorschach This IS mainly due to pressure of a large number of clinical psychologists who learned what they could of the method m the Army, and found It individually useful Perhaps more important, they found that anyone who claimed knowledge of the Rorschach had high status among Army psychiatrists After the war no small number of these psychiatnsts going into private practice and into institutional positions were looking for a clinical psychologist "who knew the Rorschach "In addition to whatever intrinsic value as a predictive tool the Rorschach has, it is possible to speculate regarding the reasons for the immense populanty of it among psychiatrists The test was devised by a psychiatrist, and the language of the test is the language of a psychiatry which is still very influential m the traditional disease entity approach to abnormal behavior The original study of the technique by Hermann Rorschach (12) and much of the data accumulated afterward have dealt with nosological entities Consequently, the ability of interpretation from the Rorschach, m the hands of an experienced clinician, to agree with psychiatnc diagnoses IS probably as high as the reliabihty of such diagnoses allows In addition, m many instances relatively untrained psychiatrists attnbuted to the Rorschach a soundness of judgment which was more charactenstic of the psychologist using the test than it was of the test Itself However, while the populanty of the Rorschach is spreading not only through professional arcles but also in the picture magazines and the movies, relatively little is being produced in terms of

The Rorschach test and suggestibility.

“…In some instances, therefore, a "validation" study would be acceptable only if such relationships were considered. As Rotter (30) has pointed out, however, the Rorschach interpreter often acts as if each unique determinant had a specific meaning. Also, the patterns that apply to an unique interpretation are rarely specified.…”

The semantic validity of TAT interpretations.

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Previous attempts to validate protective tests have been criticized for being either too atomistic or too holistic [1,4,5]. In the former case, elements of the raw data are counted and correlated with something, a process in which objectivity is retained, but the meaning and richness of the data are lost.

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“…However, nothing is learned from blind matching studies about the specific strengths and weaknesses of the interpretative process. Several authors have suggested that what needs to be studied, at present, are the separate interpretative statements which make up a full test interpretation [1,3,4,5,6]. This approach will have the shortcoming that the context will be lost, but it promises to be fruitful in providing clues as to how statements in test interpretations could be improved, in order to avoid semantic confusions.…”

Developmental trends in personality.

“…It is the whole complex of an individual's responses which must be interpreted, die meaning of any one feature being contingent on the meaning of every other feature. This over-all, sometimes intuitive, approach to personality diagnosis has forced many psychologists into sharing an opinion expressed by Rotter (82): "The major caution in the use of the test in this setting is that the psychologist recognize that he does not have an objective tool but simply another way of making observations such as he has in the interview, and that he treat his interpretations as hypotheses, not facts." This is simply another way of saying that we should be cautious about our interpretations until more objective methods of scoring and interpretation have been worked out, and until more validation studies have been conducted with positive results.…”