Katherine Hubbard & Peter Hegarty. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences. Volume 52, Issue 2. Spring 2016.
The Rorschach ink blot test is one of the most famous psychological tests in the world. Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) developed the test in the early 1920s. Rorschach was not the first person to be fascinated by the playful affordances of symmetrical ink blots for the human imagination. Ink blots inspired artists such as Leonardo di Vinci in the fifteenth century and Victor Hugo in the nineteenth century (Tulohin, 1940; Lemov, 2011). In 1857, Justinius Kerner published a game called ‘Blotto,’ which prompted players to make poetic associations to ink blots (Erdberg, 1990). Psychologist Alfred Binet suggested using ink blots to study visual imagination (Binet & Henri, 1895). Rorschach was aware of previous uses of ink blots for perceptual and artistic purposes (Akavia, 2013), and was so fond of the specific ink blot game ‘klexographie’ and of drawing in general that he was known as “Klex” (meaning ‘blot’) as a student (Ellenberger, 1954). Along with Carl Jung, whose word association experiments further influenced him, Rorschach was supervised by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler at the Burgholzli cantonal hospital in Switzerland (Akavia, 2013). In 1921, Rorschach ¨ published his only book, Psychodiagnostik, which described his experiment involving the 10 symmetrical, now highly iconic, ink blots,
The subject is given one plate after the other and asked, “What might this be”? He holds the plate in his hand and may turn it about as much as he likes. The subject is free to hold the plate near his eyes or far away as he chooses … An attempt is made to get at least one answer to every plate, though suggestion in any form is, of course, avoided (Rorschach, 1921 p. 16).
Rorschach imagined that this test allowed an understanding of personality via analysis of how his patients projected meaning on the blots. He paid less attention to what was ‘seen’ per se (Rorschach, 1921, p. 19). For example, responses were to be coded according to whether the person used the whole blot (W) ‘it all looks like a big monster’ or smaller details (d) ‘this bit here looks like a bird’ (1941, p. 40); whether the person saw movement (M) ‘a woman dancing’ (1921, p. 25) or were concerned with color (C) ‘a beautiful colorful garden’ (1921, p.29). For Rorschach, many ‘movement’ responses indicated ‘introversion,’ while many ‘colour’ responses indicated ‘extratension’ (Rorschach, 1921, p. 88). Infrequent responses were also illuminating. For example, a lack of movement (M) responses would suggest a reduced number of positive qualities of introversion such as imagination (Rorschach, 1921, p. 86; see Akavia, 2013, for a full discussion). Rorschach died of appendicitis and peritonitis in 1922 just after the publication of Psychodiagnostik (Morgenthaler, 1932; Hughes, 1950). After his death, his test received little positive attention in the German-speaking world (Ellenberger, 1954) and some speculated that Rorschach died of heart break due to the failure of his test (Lemov, 2011).
As several historians have noted, the Rorschach became remarkably popular in midtwentieth century ‘North American psychology and psychiatry’. In addition to accounts by ‘insiders’ to the Rorschach testing movement in the US, Buchanan (1997) has carefully narrated the rise and fall of faith in the Rorschach with respect to the American Psychological Association’s (APA) attempt to define test validity in the decades after the Second World War. More recent critical essays have focused on faith in the Rorschach test’s ability to reveal the minds of ‘othered’ groups in postwar American society. Such groups include: the defeated Nazi enemy (Brunner, 2001); colonized and decolonizing societies (Lemov, 2011); and gay men (Hegarty, 2003). There is also considerable overlap between history and critique; the test’s harshest critics have also written histories of the tests usage in the US and the history of empirical criticism of the test’s validity (see Wood, Nezworski, Lilienfeld & Garb, 2003). In various ways, these histories flesh out Galison’s (2004) conceptual point that the Rorschach is not a passive object, but a means of ‘making up’ people and power relationships between people.
The history of the Rorschach’s use outside the US has primarily been of interest to Rorschach users themselves through national histories of testing in such countries as Japan (Sorai & Ohnuki, 2008); Finland (Mattlar & Fried, 1993); Turkey (˙Ikiz, 2011) and India (Manickam & Dubey, 2006). Such histories do begin to ‘internationalize’ the history of Rorschach testing (Brock, 2006), but barely consider the history of critique of projective testing in psychological science, or the political and ethical stakes involved in extending the ‘projective hypothesis’ to whole societies, political ideologies, or marginalized social groups. Indeed, such ‘insider’ histories are often celebratory narratives attempting to explain the “origin” of Rorschach networks in particular locations. In the case of Britain, there are two such histories written by Rorschach users (Friedemann, 1968; McCarthy Woods, 2008). Both focus on the development of the British Rorschach Forum (1948-1997) around London’s Tavistock Institute and their publication The Rorschach Newsletter (1952-1997). Both histories acknowledge that uptake of the Rorschach in Britain was limited in comparison to other countries such as the US.
The purpose of this article is to explore the history of Rorschach testing in Britain and to contrast it with the American experience. We build on the ‘insider histories’ of Friedemann (1968) and McCarthy Woods (2008) and position British Rorschach testing in relation to a range of social, institutional, and political contexts. This history throws into relief how the differences between British and American clinical psychology, experiences with the Second World War and the cold war, and responses to challenges to the Rorschach’s validity and shaped the confidence with which individual psychologists concluded that ink blots could or could not be trusted to reveal psychological truths.
We draw on the first author’s reading of all available issues of the primary British publication for Rorschach work, initially named The Rorschach Newsletter (1952-1968), and later renamed the British Journal of Projective Psychology and Personality Study (1968-1986), and the British Journal of Projective Psychology (1987-1997). We also draw on Rorschach research in better-known British journals throughout the twentieth century and an oral history with one active member of the British Rorschach Forum and further materials they provided. First, we describe the interwar context in which projective testing first attracted interest among British psychologists and psychiatrists. Second, we contrast the limited engagement of Rorschach testing with military psychology in the Second World War in Britain with the remarkable uptake of the test in the US. Next, we describe the Rorschach network in depth from the end of the Second World War to 1968 when they hosted the International Rorschach Conference, highlighting differences in the research methods and interests of British and U.S. testers. During this heyday, women were very well represented in the British Rorschach group, but men came to dominate the group in the 1970s during a period of decline that has no counterpart to the re-invigoration of interest in the test with John Exner’s ‘comprehensive system’ in the US. By conducting such a history not only do we answer the question of who tested whom and why in Britain but also give reasons to consider the uptake of the Rorschach in the US as highly particular. We conclude that contextualized and comparative histories of the Rorschach’s use beyond the US have much to tell us about the particular reasons for the Rorschach’s power in the US.
The Introduction of the Rorschach
Social upheaval during the First World War lead psychologists in Britain to consider new ways of thinking about madness, sanity, normality, and deviance (Richards, 2000), increasing the appeal of psychoanalysis (see Bogacz, 1989). It was in this context that British psychologists and psychiatrists began to consider the merits of projective testing. In London in 1913, just prior to the First World War, Ernst Jones developed the London Psycho-Analytical Society, physician Jessie Murray and teacher Julia Turner opened the Medico-Psychological Clinic, and the Maudsley Hospital opened its gates. During the war, psychiatrist W.H.R Rivers adopted and developed Freud’s ideas about the unconscious to treat shell-shock while at Craiglockhart War hospital in Edinburgh. Soldiers were also rehabilitated at the Medico-Psychological Clinic, which was disbanded in 1922 (Hinshelwood, 1999; Hayward, 2014). In 1920, Psychiatrist Hugh Crighton-Miller opened the Tavistock clinic where psychodynamic and ‘applied psychoanalytic’ approaches were adopted with vigor (Dicks, 1970; Hall, 2007a, 2007b). By 1925, the London Psycho-Analytical Society had grown considerably attracting new members from the Society for Psychical Research, Cambridge University, psychiatrists with military experience, those who had worked at the Medico-Psychological Clinic, general practitioners, and members of the literary Bloomsbury group (Hinshelwood, 1999; Hayward, 2014). Psychological thinking was also not yet influenced by behaviorist approaches becoming popular in the US (Richards, 2000); the unconscious was in vogue.
Women were well-represented but often marginalized in these new networks. Seventeen of 54 members of the London Psycho-Analytical Society were women in 1924 (Hinshelwood, 1999, see also Sayers, 1991). The focus on sex in psychoanalytic theory was not received in Britain: as well as it was in the US; British sexologist Havelock Ellis declined Jones’ invitation to join the London Psycho-Analytical Society (Hinshelwood, 1999). However, some psychologists were interested in sexual reform, women’s rights, and sex education (Richards, 2000), and both Jessie Murray and Julia Turner were deeply involved with the Suffragette movement (Hinshelwood, 1999). However, gender issues remained. Alice Woods, one of the founding members of the British Psychological Society, described how at the very first reading of Freud’s work in 1913 all of the women attending were asked to leave the room (Valentine, 2008a). A number of women psychoanalysts began specifically working with children (Sayers, 1991), an activity granted greater importance after the First World War and deemed socially appropriate for women (Richards, 2000). Such attitudes and divisions of labor was also evident in U.S. psychology in the interwar years (Furumoto & Scarborough, 1986; Scarborough & Furumoto, 1989; Rutherford, Vaughn-Johnson, & Rodkey, 2015).
Between the world wars, psychoanalysis became accepted in British psychology but to a lesser extent than in the US (Richards, 2000). As several authors have noted, interest in Rorschach interpretation developed in the US between the wars among social scientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists centered around Columbia University. Psychiatrist David Levy (1892-1977) brought the Rorschach from Switzerland to the Institute of Child Guidance in New York in 1924 (Million, Grossman, & Meagher, 2004). Levy taught the test to Samuel Beck (1896-1980), a University of Columbia student studying on a fellowship at the Institute (Million, Grossman, & Meagher, 2004). Beck in turn inspired Marguerite Hertz, and both Beck and Hertz completed dissertations using the Rorschach at Columbia (Buchanan, 1997). Bruno Klopfer picked up the test in Switzerland where he briefly studied with Carl Jung while escaping Nazi Germany (Skadeland, 1986; Million, Grossman, & Meagher, 2004). In 1934, Klopfer arrived in the US, and also began work at the University of Columbia assisting the anthropologist Franz Boas. Klopfer began teaching Rorschach interpretation to students (Skadeland, 1986; Handler & Acklin, 1994; Buchanan, 1997; Million, Grossman, & Meagher, 2004; Lemov, 2011). One of Klopfer’s original students was Zygmunt Piotrowski, a European psychologist who had also escaped Nazi-occupied Europe, who later developed a perceptual approach to Rorschach interpretation.
Interest in the Rorschach among psychologists and psychiatrists is evident in Britain during this period. British psychoanalysis remained situated within smaller clinics and the offices of self-employed analysts (Hinshelwood, 1999), with the Tavistock representing the firmest institutional base for a psychoanalytically sympathetic approach (Hall, 2007a, 2007b). It was from this context of ‘new psychology’ and a zeitgeist of a concern about the unconscious in the Britain that the Rorschach emerged. In 1925, psychiatrist Mary Rushton Barkas, of the Maudsley Hospital, published a detailed review of Psychodiagnostik in the British Journal of Psychiatry, describing Rorschach’s data, the test’s use in Swiss psychology, and offering the prediction that the test ‘may well prove worth introduction into those of this country’ (p. 330). A year later in the British Journal of Psychiatry, W.D. Chambers published his psychiatric notes from a trip to Zurich that described Rorschach’s test as a ‘novel method of testing apperception’ (Chambers, 1926, p. 277). Barkas thought that Rorschach’s test, like Jung’s Word Association Test, was ‘most useful if applied in a more general way, less for the object of rigid diagnosis than as a means of approach to the patient’s complexes’ (Barkas, 1925, p. 330). Barkas also expressed disbelief in Rorschach’s powers of insight that foreshadowed the idea that the test had to be used by experts to be effective, which became increasingly common in both Britain and the US from the 1930s:
Yet in reading the data on which Rorschach’s conclusions were based one cannot but feel that he either made lucky guesses, rather in the mode of the fortune-teller, or else that his extensive experience of the test combined with great intuition gave him a skill in interpreting the data which few could attain (Barkas, 1925, p. 331).
By the early 1930s, reports of clinical practice with the Rorschach were already evident in British journals. In 1931, Gordon and Norman reported using the Rorschach to test different types of ‘mental defectives’ in the British Medical Journal. In 1933 and 1934, The British Journal of Psychiatry published summaries of research which included Rorschach publications. However, criticisms of the Rorschach’s potential soon followed (see Lewis, 1934).
Original forms of projective psychology also developed in Britain during this time. From 1925, Margaret Lowenfeld developed a technique in which children used small toys and sand to make what became known as ‘worlds’ (Bowyer, 1970; Lowenfeld, 1979). Like the Rorschach and the TAT, Lowenfeld’s World Technique was inspired by popular culture, specifically H.G. Wells’ 1911 book Floor Games. From 1929, Lowenfeld formally developed the World Technique and later developed the Mosaic test, and used them in her clinic the Institute of Child Psychiatry in London. Though Lowenfeld commonly rejected the description of her methods as ‘projective’ (see her obituary by Margaret Mead, 1974), the tests were regularly described as such by others. In 1937, Carl Jung interpreted one of her ‘worlds’ at an internal congress in Paris (Bowyer, 1970) and the test remains in use today (Rogers Mitchell & Friedman, 1994).
The Rorschach was also investigated by university-based research psychologists. In 1932, Oscar Oeser (1932a, 1932b) of the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory published two research studies on form and colour in the Rorschach. Oeser described the Rorschach as an item that had ‘so often been found useful in experiments on perceiving and imaging, for here the subject is absolutely free to react in whatever way suits him most’ (1932a, p. 19). His Rorschach work was cited by his mentor Frederic Bartlett in his magnum opus Remembering (1932). Oeser was not alone among Cambridge students in taking an interest in the Rorschach. In 1933, Philip E. Vernon, a recent Cambridge graduate, published four papers on the Rorschach (Vernon, 1933a, 1933b, 1933c, 1933d, also see Vernon, 1935a, 1935b). Vernon described how to use the test, expressed enthusiasm for its use, and considered the development of new blots. While aware of criticisms, Vernon remained optimistic about the development of the Rorschach test:
… the deficiencies of the Rorschach ink-blot method as a psychometric test have been amply demonstrated, in particular the uncertainties and subjectivity of its scoring, the lack of adequate norms, poor reliability, and almost complete lack of scientifically controlled validation. Yet I cannot agree that these deficiencies should lead to its rejection by investigators in the field of personality … I am unable to call to mind any other test of personality … which tells me as much about my subjects in so short a time as does the Rorschach test (Vernon, 1993c, p. 291, also see Hearnshaw, 1964).
These papers appeared after Vernon spent a year at Harvard collaborating with Gordon Allport on the measurement of personality-related values (Vernon & Allport, 1931). In the same year, Vernon joined the Maudsley Hospital. In addition, Oliver Zangwill of the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory also published on the Rorschach (Zangwill, 1945). Vernon’s sister, Magdalen Vernon, also later published projective work while studying under Bartlett at Cambridge (see Vernon, 1940). Her work however, while projective, was more concerned with phantasy, play, and projection through cognitive processes. She was also influenced by the work of Margaret Lowenfeld, with whom she later had regular correspondence. In sum, despite the idea that the Rorschach was introduced in Britain by Theodora Alcock in 1933 (McCarthy Woods, 2008), there was ample consideration of the Rorschach’s powers and their limitations among clinicians and researchers prior to this time. The uptake of projective techniques was particularly keen among women clinicians in London working with children due to Lowenfeld’s influence. In 1932, the British Journal of Psychology received a review of Samuel Beck’s The Rorschach Test and Personality Diagnosis (1930) exposing British psychologists to recent developments in the US.
The Second World War: Blitz and Blots
The Second World War acted as a catalyst for the development of psychology in both the US and Britain. The engagement of psychiatry and psychology with the military effort in the US outstripped that in any other country at war. Psychologically healthy recruits were required for war, and so mental testing was not only used to test the ‘feeble-minded’ but also to screen all recruits (Capshew, 1999; Rose, 1999). From 1920 to 1946, the APA membership grew from 393 to 4,427 (Herman, 1995). Key psychologists became involved, for example, B.F. Skinner helped behaviorally train missile guiding pigeons; Murray began work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at Station ‘S,’ and David Levy organized a ‘personality screening center’ (Herman, 1995; Rose, 1999). Dr. William C. Menninger organized most of the general military recruit screening as Chief Psychiatric Consultant to the Surgeon General of the Army (Menninger, 2004). In total, 3,000 psychologists assisted in the war effort compared to 700 in the First World War in the US (Herman, 1995) and Rorschach workers were no exception. In 1936, Klopfer had begun editing the Rorschach Research Exchange with the Menninger Clinic in Kansas, drawing upon his informal seminars at Columbia University (Ellenberger, 1954; Million, Grossman, & Meagher, 2004; Lemov, 2011). In 1939, he established the Society for Projective Techniques and the Rorschach Institute. In addition, David Rapaport and Roy Shafer, who both worked at the Menninger Clinic, developed the Rapaport-Schafer Rorschach scoring system in the early 1940s (Rapaport, 1942, see Buchanan, 1997). Klopfer also organized a ‘Volunteer Rorschach Unit’ in 1942 for those who worked with the Rorschach and were in active service (Hegarty, 2003).
The development of clinical psychology throughout the 1930s was slower in Britain than in the US (Hall, 2007a, 2007b), and the British military were more wary of testing in general and projective testing in particular than their American counterparts. Although the Rorschach was not used for initial screening in either country, it was not used for assessment after battle, or officer selection in Britain as it was in the US (Hegarty, 2003). When the Rorschach was initially suggested for officer selection it was swiftly rejected in part because it was believed to be ‘middle European absurdity on par with Kindergartens, Rudolf Steiner, Herbal tea and foreign plumbing’ (Shephard, 2002, p. 193). Psychiatrists J.R. Rees and Ronald Hargreaves became consultants to the Army in 1939 and Rees initially unsuccessfully attempted to show the military the benefits of intelligence testing recruits (Shephard, 2002). In 1941, Rees was formally appointed as a Consultant Psychiatrist to the British Army and he assembled a group of psychologists and psychiatrists to deal with such military issues as the screening of recruits, the selection of officers and the rehabilitation of soldiers after battle (Bourke, 2001). War Officer Selection Boards (WOSBs) were set up in 1942 that combined the work of both psychologists conducting testing and psychiatrists conducting interviews to serve these ends. Those psychologists involved in the war effort included John Raven and Eric Trist from the Maudsley, as well as Tavistock psychiatrists such as John Bowlby, Rees, and Hargreaves (Shephard, 1999; Murphy, 2008). At the beginning of the Second World War, the Maudsley was relocated further out of London, to Mill Hill School and Belmont Hospital due to threat of bombing in central London (Hall, 2007b).
Projective tests were adapted as group tests for officer selection in Britain as in the US. From 1942 onward, potential officers were tested with self-description questionnaires; intelligence tests; the Word Association Test; the TAT; and physical military tests (Shephard, 2002; Murphy, 2008). Simeon Gillman’s (1947) Methods of Officer Selection in the Army described the methods used for officer selection in Britain in the Second World War. These included failed tests of a modified Rorschach in Edinburgh for use in WOSBs. The intelligence tests and the modified group versions of the TAT and Word Association Test in contrast were deemed useful in providing ‘personality pointers,’ which psychiatrists on WOSBs could expand upon in interviews with each officer (Gillman, 1947). In fact, Murphy (2008) recalled that it was his dislike of the Rorschach that lead him to be invited to become a sergeant tester/psychological assistant;
I joined the Royal Armoured Corps in 1941 and after two years as a regimental instructor with armoured vehicles and a short period in hospital, where it was noted that I had argued with a visiting psychologist on the merits of her Rorschach test, it was decided that I might be better employed with WOSBs where there was a shortage of psychologists to carry out testing, and the category of sergeant tester/psychological assistant was invented (Murphy, 2008, p. 20).
In sum, although there was some experimentation with projective testing for military ends in Britain, attitudes to the Rorschach were far more negative than those in the US.
The civilian experience of the Second World War also differed between the two countries, shaping the forms of psychological distress that would come to psychologists’ attention. The war was not fought overseas for the British and the heavy bombing of London, often referred to as ‘the Blitz,’ deeply impacted the lives of British people. The same wartime context that occasioned Bowbly’s theory of attachment—the evacuation of children from London—also sparked the interest of Alcock. Alcock’s first published paper, The bombed child and the Rorschach test, was a brief note published in the British Medical Journal in 1941. Alcock reported that 70 percent of her evacuee sample had ‘fire or explosive K responses’ to the ink blots, but cautioned that these children’s responses might not necessarily be due to a ‘bomb-induced neurosis.’ The history of the Rorschach in Britain was therefore less about military strength as in the US, but more about the effects of war-related trauma, especially on children.
Institutional Influences and the British Rorschach Forum
As several authors have noted, the Rorschach quickly became the most popular test in clinical practice in the US after the Second World War (e.g., Sundberg, 1961). Military codes provided the psychoanalytic blueprint for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders first published by the APA in 1952 (Grob, 1991). After the war, the field of clinical psychology expanded exponentially in training and practice (Leveille, 2002; Scull, 2015). Postwar American psychologists aimed to maintain a scientific discipline that was increasingly statistical and to prove the utility of scientist-practitioners who would apply psychology to an expanding range of contexts in the coming decades. Projective testing occupied several locations in this landscape. New schemes of Rorschach interpretation had become popular through military and forensic work included ‘content analysis,’ which allowed for direct Freudian interpretations of responses to the ink blots, in a marked deviation from Rorschach’s original focus on the ‘determinants’ of the response (Phillips & Smith, 1953). These dubious schemes raised concerns among statistically minded psychologists who developed the language of ‘test validity’ and ‘construct validity’ to manage the investment of trust in psychological tests in clinical contexts (Cronbach, 1949; Meehl, 1954; see Buchanan, 1997; Wood et al., 2003). Psychiatrists and psychologists in the US were undergoing a battle over psychotherapy (Buchanan, 2003; Mosher, 2008). This was highly linked to psychoanalytic thinking in psychotherapy that was originally under the domain of psychiatrists (Mosher, 2008). Though after the war psychiatrists began to move further into private practice and clinical psychologists began to stake claims once the field began to get more established in the 1950s (Leveille, 2002; Scull, 2015). Some psychologists had to convince psychiatrists that they were best positioned to determine which tests were best to use (Buchanan, 2010). Psychologists at the time were subordinate to psychiatrists in both Britain and the US; psychologists were able to analyze tests but not diagnose (Derksen, 2001b; Buchanan, 2003). Training in clinical psychology during this period typically addressed projective tests and the Rorschach in particular (see Buchanan, 1997; Wood et al., 2003). Research output on the Rorschach peaked, and the tests were taken up enthusiastically by heavily funded social scientists, who often carried them to remote locations to make sense of unfamiliar societies (Lemov, 2011).
The scientist-practitioner model also took hold in Britain the 1950s and trainee clinical psychologists completed training in therapy as well as research (Pilgrim & Treacher, 1992). This balance between science and practice played out very differently in different institutions in London. At the Maudsley, under Eysenck’s influence, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis were critiqued (see Pilgrim & Treacher, 1992; Derksen, 2001a; Buchanan, 2003), while the Tavistock remained an institutional base for psychodynamic thinking (Derksen, 2001a). The tension between the two institutions shaped the uptake of the Rorschach test in the practice and in the training of British practitioners.
The first program in clinical psychology in Britain was taught at the Institute of Psychiatry, which was positioned at the Maudsley in 1946. Aubrey Lewis, who had described the test as of ‘limited or doubtful value’ as early as 1934, was Chair of Psychiatry at the Institute from 1946 until his retirement in 1966. In 1942, Lewis employed Hans Eysenck, following a recommendation from Philip Vernon (Jensen, 1989; Hall, 2007b; Buchanan, 2010). Eysenck took over the role of Senior Research Officer previously held by Eric Trist who went to work at the Tavistock after the Second World War (Trist, 1993; Buchanan, 2010). Eysenck oversaw the training of the first British clinical psychologists at the Institute of Psychiatry from 1947 onward, but the training itself was mainly the responsibility of psychologist Monte Shapiro (Buchanan, 2010). Shapiro, however, did not wish to teach the Rorschach himself and instead employed Swiss expert Maryse Israel to provide Rorschach training in the late 1940s (Buchanan, 2010). By 1955, those at the Maudsley had decided to discontinue using the Rorschach. In fact, a ‘critical discussion’ meeting was held on Saturday May 21, 1955 and all members of the Committee of Professional Psychologists were invited to give their comments on this decision. The discussion appears to have done nothing but confirm the anti-Rorschach position of many at the Maudsley. The Maudsley training program dominated clinical teaching in Britain producing twice as many graduates as the Tavistock, whose courses declined further in the 1970s (Buchanan, 2010). It was also home to one of the most influential critics of the test. Eysenck’s 1959 scathing review in Buro’s influential Mental Measurements Yearbook described no less than 10 damning criticisms of the Rorschach’s validity, likened the test to phrenology, and concluded that ‘the Rorschach has failed to establish its scientific or practical value’ (Buros, 1959, p. 277).
In contrast, a small Rorschach group formed and persisted at the more psychoanalytic Tavistock Institute. Having discussed the Rorschach via letters throughout the war, psychologists Theodora Alcock and Eric Trist and Psychiatrist C.J.C. Earl formed the British Rorschach Forum at the Tavistock Institute in 1942, 10 years before the founding of the International Rorschach Society. Earl was one of the first in Britain to use the Rorschach, and his work at Caterham Hospital in South London had influenced Theodora Alcock’s paper on evacuated children. Dr. W.E.R Mons—a Swiss Psychiatrist who had had also informed Alcock’s early work—was Honorary Chairman of the Forum. Alcock was its first Honorary Vice Chairman. Herbert Phillipson, who had worked on WOSBs and began to work at the Tavistock from 1945, was Honorary Secretary. All of the society’s technical meetings, summer conferences, workshops, seminars, and courses took place at the Tavistock from the late 1940s to the late 1990s.
In 1952, the society began its biannual publication The Rorschach Newsletter, which ran until 1997. In the first issue, it was announced that Earl had resigned as Chairman due to ill health, but would remain the Honorary Vice-President of the Forum. The society was initially exclusive in its membership, its object being to ‘safe-guard professional standards in the use of the Rorschach and restrict membership to society selection’ (Editorial, Williams, 1952). Membership was to be decided by a subcommittee and required the candidate to be ‘experienced and proficient.’ However, the society also expressed an aim to widen its interests to other projective tests early on. Methodologically, the group was focused on case-studies, and the aim of The Rorschach Newsletter was to ‘enable all members of the Rorschach Forum to keep in touch with work that is being done’ (Editorial, Williams, 1952).
To understand why Rorschach testing might have remained confined to this small Tavistock-based group, it is necessary not only to consider the lack of national investment in the projective hypothesis during wartime and the influence of the Maudsely on training, but also to consider other major institutional changes in Britain after the war. In 1948, the National Health Service (NHS) was founded on socialist principles that health care should be free and available to all irrespective of the capacity to pay, altering the ways in which mental health services were provided in Britain (Hall, 2007a; Hayward, 2014). General practitioners were expected to have greater psychiatric knowledge than before (Hayward, 2014) and the role of clinical psychologists became more clearly defined (Derksen, 2001a). Lowenfeld shared a common view among clinical practitioners that a national service would increase uniformity and interfere with personal contacts between patient and doctor (Urwin & Hood-Wiliams, 2013). Her Institute of Child Psychotherapy became a nonprofit limited company in reaction to the founding of the NHS, but through an arrangement with the North West Regional Health Authority it continued to work with poorer children (Traill & Hood-Williams, 1973; Urwin & Hood-Wiliams, 2013).
The Rorschach was in clinical use in Britain in some sites beyond the Tavistock, such as Tooting Bec Hospital in London (e.g., Scott, 1965; Barker, 1970), and in Child Guidance Clinics (e.g., O’Kelly, 1972). Many vocational centers also adopted projective methods for assessment in the following decades (see Orford, 1965; Kaldegg, 1966). The majority of Rorschach testers in Britain were psychologists. Earl had attempted to popularize the test among psychiatrists but with little success, mirroring the military’s earlier rejection of it.
Relatedly, the British scene was far more concentrated on psychotherapeutic uses of projective tests, unlike the US where the Rorschach was a frequent object of academic research. Few members of the Forum achieved academic posts—a notable exception being Boris Semeonoff, who taught Rorschach techniques from his position on the faculty at the University of Edinburgh. The use of projective tests in Scotland was also supported by Ralph and Ruth Pickford at the University of Glasgow, and Raven described the three-year clinical psychologist training course provided by the Crichton Royal in Scotland in 1956, which required experience of a whole range of tests, including the Rorschach. Due to the growing interest in the Rorschach, and the lack of uptake in universities, Alcock successfully ran training courses at the Tavistock in response to high demand from 1954 until her retirement in 1968 (McCully, 1981; McCarthy Woods, 2008). In sum, the Rorschach found a network in Britain, but one that was marginalized from academic psychology and much less firmly embedded in clinical practice than in the US.
The Subjects of the Rorschach: Who Tested Who in Britain and the US?
During the heyday of Rorschach testing in Britain and the US, some psychological subjects were more pertinent than others reflecting each national context of the late 1950s and 1960s. Here, we consider who was testing whom and how these were similar and different in Britain and the US. Of the available articles of The Rorschach Newsletter, one-quarter reported empirical studies focused on children or adolescents. These included studies of children with brain damage (Williams, 1958); deprived children (Wilkinson, 1964); deaf children (Bowyer, Gillies, & Scott, 1966), and others. This focus contrasts the research conducted on adults in the US and shows continuity with the early use of projective tests in Child Guidance Clinics. Relatedly, authors of these publications in the Newsletter tended to be overwhelmingly women in the decades after the Second World War in contrast to both the U.S. Rorschach literature and the gendered make-up of British psychologists in this period.
The practice of women psychologists testing children renders the British group distinct. Individual women such as Beatrice Engel made pioneering contributions to British psychology (see Valentine, 2008b, 2010), but acceptance of women into British psychology was generally slow. Both Oxford and Cambridge universities were reluctant to accept women students (Shields, 2007), many military positions for psychologists were closed to women (Bohan, 1990), and the pressure to choose either a career or marriage was common (Milar, 2000, also see Buchanan, 2003; Myers, 2012). Women were well-represented among British clinical psychologists until the 1950s. The original Committee of Professional Psychologists established in 1943 within the British Psychological Society was overwhelmingly made up of women and early meetings of this group included no men at all. The representation of women was tied to the focus on working with children, which was considered more suited to women in the middle of the twentieth century. Women were often persuaded into such areas as they were more receptive and offered more opportunity (Rutherford, Vaughn-Johnson, & Rodkey, 2015). The evacuation of children from London during the Second World War heightened a concern for research and therapy with children in Britain (Richards, 2000). However, from the 1950s onward new members of the Committee of Professional Psychologists were increasingly likely to be men (Hall, 2007b), and the original emphasis on educational and child psychology was subsumed by the growth of adult clinical psychology (Hall, 2007b). In both Britain and in the US, the influx of men into clinical psychology in the 1950s was precipitated by deliberate attempts to articulate a vision of a mentally healthy relationship between family and work around male breadwinners and female homemakers (Morawski & Agronick, 1991; Herman, 1995; Jennings, 2007).
In the marginal British projective community, women remained surprisingly wellrepresented even in the 1950s and 1960s. Bohan (1990) has suggested that women psychologists often found work in testing because it was sometimes believed to require less technical knowledge than other forms of psychology, and was viewed as lower status. This argument applies to the British Rorschach Forum; in 1958, there were eight women and five men on the committee, and women occupied 62-71 percent of committee positions until 1969. In December 1966, a register showed that 48 percent of all society fellows, members, and associates were women. Among the first authors of publications in The Rorschach Newsletter from 1952 to 1968, 41 percent were women, 58 percent were men, and 1 percent could not be identified. In contrast, there were few women among notable U.S. Rorschach researchers, excluding Marguerite Hertz, Molly Harrower-Erickson, and Evelyn Hooker (who was a critic of the test).
The knowledge developed from this network also contrasts with the Cold War concerns of the U.S. (Lemov, 2011). British Rorschach did not ‘over-reach’ the projective hypothesis into matters of social concerns, contrasting with U.S. researchers concerns to discern the inner psyches of Nazis, gay men, and colonized and postcolonial people. There were no studies in The Rorschach Newsletter from these years on political types at all, in contrast to the long fascination in the US with the Rorschach tests conducted in the Nuremberg jail by David Kelley (Brunner, 2001; Dimsdale, 2015).
Nor are there any there any direct studies of gay men in the Rorschach Newsletter in these years, in contrast to the interest in ‘homosexual signs’ in the U.S. literature (see Hegarty, 2003). The Second World War was the first occurrence of psychiatric exclusion based on homosexuality (Berube, 1990) and the Rorschach was used to detect straight men malingering ´ as gay as to avoid active service (Hegarty, 2003). In America, there was a wealth of research on the topic, which was somewhat emphasized by the Cold War (Lemov, 2011), and the concerns surrounding masculinity (Nicholson, 2011). British psychologists however, did not conduct research to the same extent on the detection of homosexuality. In the First World War, there was some suggestion that ‘active inverts,’ as opposed to “passive inverts,” would be useful soldiers who might turn their aggressive natures toward the enemy and heroically defend their fellows (Bourke, 2001). Such rare gay-affirmative attitudes were in complete contrast to the singularly homophobic views of military psychology and psychiatry in the US (Berube, 1990).
As the Rorschach was used for homophobic ends in the US during the Second World War, the history of ‘gay-affirmative’ research has engaged the history of the Rorschach (Hegarty, 2003). In Los Angeles in the 1950s, psychologist Evelyn Hooker secured National Institute of Mental Health funding, collaborated with the homophile Mattachine Society, and published influential studies showing that leading Rorschach experts, including Klopfer, could not discern gay men from straight men from their responses to the Rorschach alone (Hooker, 1957, 1958, see Hooker, 1992). In contrast, in Britain during the 1960s, affirmative research took a very different turn. American psychologist June Hopkins collaborated with the lesbian group the Minorities Research Group and argued for distinct lesbian signs on the Rorschach (Hopkins, 1969, 1970; Jennings, 2007). Hopkins conducted her research in order to defend lesbian women whom she had known who had been dismissed from the U.S. Air Force. She had concluded in her papers that lesbian women were more independent, resilient, reserved, dominant, bohemian, self-sufficient, and composed than heterosexual women (Hopkins, 1969). In the US, Hooker’s Rorschach work has been often described as pivotal to the development of affirmative lesbian and gay psychology. In contrast, Hopkins’ work was quickly written off as homophobic, as in Morin’s (1977) important critical review of the psychological literature after the depathologizing of homosexuality by the APA. Only in the twenty-first century, after a more social constructionist form of lesbian and gay psychology developed in Britain (Coyle & Kitzinger, 2002), was Hopkins’ work reclaimed as an early sign of progressive thought (Clarke & Hopkins, 2002). Hopkins also later came out as a lesbian herself (Clarke & Hopkins, 2002).
The difference between the receptions of Hopkins’ and Hooker’s somewhat similar studies demonstrates how national and institutional contexts determine what Rorschach results can mean. In the US where the Rorschach was used to detect homosexuality ‘difference’ implied ‘pathology’ (Hegarty, 2003), but Hopkins’ work could follow a different logic in Britain where the Rorschach was not used for this purpose. The differential influence of psychoanalysis in clinical psychology in the two countries also helps to explain why their work was perceived so differently. Psychoanalysis had continued to grow in popularity in the US until the 1950s whereas in Britain its popularity began to wane at the end of the 1930s (Richards, 2000). Indeed, psychoanalytic principles were incorporated into the ‘content analysis’ in the US used to detect straight soldiers malingering as gay (Hegarty, 2003), which Hooker would later critique. British clinical psychology, by contrast, being dominated by the Maudsley approach, was more influenced by the thinking of Eysenck who rejected psychoanalysis (Buchanan, 2010). As a result, Hopkins had greater freedom to generate positive interpretations in her presentation of lesbian signs on the Rorschach.
Despite such differences, there were some areas of overlap in the social concerns addressed by British and U.S. Rorschach testers. The consumption of drugs and alcohol was a concern for psychologists in the US (see Bertrand & Masling, 1969; Buhler & LeFever; 1947; Rabin, Papania, & McMichael, 1954) and in Britain. From the 1960s especially, the Rorschach was used to test the personality of alcoholics and drug users, and testing was carried out in hospitals (Scott, 1965), as well as in therapeutic groups (Luzzatto, 1987). This concern continued for decades and was particularly focused on adolescents (e.g., Mahmood, 1985). In keeping with the British society’s aim to ‘not lose sight of the case-study presentation,’ most of the drug use studies were case-study reports, while a few drew upon larger samples.
Finally, the British history also throws into relief the uptake of the Rorschach in the social sciences in the US to make sense of culture (Lemov, 2011). Hermann Rorschach himself expressed a desire to test the Congolese using the Rorschach, exclaiming that ‘The test itself is technically so simple- it can be done through an interpreter- that it may be done with the most primitive Negro as easily as with a cultured European’ (Rorschach, 1921, p. 97). In Britain, Rorschach users began to raise questions about the use of the test with those from Britain’s former empire. Jones and Jones’ (1964) article ‘Projective materials from a few West Indian subjects – The problem of assessment’ and Herzberg’s (1964) ‘Can we Test Africans?’ framed such questions directly. In the 1960s, Rorschach researchers attempted to develop new norms for ethnic groups such as Greek children (Routsoni, 1965) and Bengalis (Zakia, 1964). Colonial thinking and racist stereotypes are clearly evident in this work. Herzberg likened Rorschach responses of British children to African adults and laid particular importance on breastfeeding practices in the formation of ‘African personality.’ Rorschach research on culture in both the US and Britain is characterized by an epistemological dilemma; the Rorschach is often imagined to be both a ‘culture-fair’ test that can access unconscious material irrespective of culture, and one that accesses unconscious material that is understood to be distinctly ‘cultural.’ The test both looks through, and at, ‘culture’ and in both the US and in Britain it allowed researchers to opine about cultures with the authority of experts, irrespective of the level of their cultural understanding.
On August 4, 1968, the work amassed on the Rorschach in Britain climaxed at the seventh International Rorschach Congress was held in London under the title ‘The Projective Approach to the Study of Personality.’ The six-day congress was opened by Bowlby, and has become viewed by Rorschach users as the high point of the British Rorschach history (Campo, 1993; McCarthy Woods, 2008). It was criticized by some international visitors who reported that it was ‘very British’ and had lost the ‘international element’ (McCully & Palmquist, 1968). Despite this, the conference was deemed very successful and drew in a large crowd of projective workers.
The Decline of the Rorschach
By the late 1960s, scientific criticisms of the Rorschach’s validity such as those by Hooker, Meehl, and Eysenck became increasingly inescapable (see also Meehl, 1954; Suinn & Oskamp, 1969; see Buchanan, 1997; Wood et al., 2003). By 1961, the Minnesota Multiphastic Personality Inventory (MMPI) had become more popular than the Rorschach as a diagnostic test in the US for the first time (Buchanan, 1997). The antipsychiatry movement also gave vocal critique to the power that inhered in testing and diagnosing without consent or transparency (Crossley, 1998). Critique had progressed beyond demonstrations of projective tests’ lack of validity, to cognitive explanations of the illusory diagnostic power of the Rorschach test (Chapman & Chapman, 1969); Rorschach testers reported seeing ‘signs’ in a person’s responses that correlated with their diagnosis, even when such signs were not actually present.
In this context, John Exner breathed new life into the Rorschach by reviewing the U.S. history in terms of the five major systems of Rorschach interpretation, and acknowledging that those systems all fell short of psychologists’ standards of test validity (Exner, 1969). Exner proposed a new ‘comprehensive’ system of interpretation, which held out the promise of addressing those criticisms (Exner, 1969, 1993, 2003). In the US, Exner’s work was taken up enthusiastically in the new Schools of Professional Psychology that developed in the 1970s, whose graduates with ‘Psy.D.’ training increasingly competed with those with doctorates in clinical psychology trained in the scientist-practitioner model (Wood et al., 2003). While some participants in the British Rorschach Forum recall the global influence of Exner’s work at this time, his work did not revive the test’s reputation in Britain. The British Rorschach Forum adopted the strategy of broadening the group’s focus from the Rorschach to a wider range of projective techniques. In June 1968, the title of the journal was changed to the British Journal of Projective Psychology and Personality Study. Simultaneously, the British Rorschach Forum changed its name to the British Rorschach Forum and Society for Projective Techniques. These changes were made to ‘reflect development in the scope of the society’s interests, which now include a range of projective techniques in addition to the Rorschach’ (Editorial, Williams, 1968). In 1970, the name of the society was changed again to the British Society for Projective Psychology and Personality Study omitting the word ‘Rorschach’ altogether. Other attempts to widen membership led the society away from its earlier strategy of making membership exclusive to experts. Mirroring the uptake of Exner’s system in the US, more attempts were made to include psychotherapists in the group by loosening membership restrictions (Mahmood, 1986). Appropriately, this was also a moment for historical review. In June 1968, Alfred Friedemann, then Secretary General of the International Rorschach Society, published the first history of Rorschach testing in Britain (Friedemann, 1968), which celebrated the developments of the Rorschach in Europe, its associations with psychoanalysis, and the achievements of the British society led by the teaching of Alcock. These changes were not successful in offsetting criticism of the test’s validity. Writing in the British Medical Journal, Rollin (1970) predicted that the Rorschach would soon be no more in British psychology, and posited in the event of a ‘psychologist of the year (or decade) award’ then it ‘must go to Professor H. J. Eysenck, the most famed and the most controversial psychologist on the English, perhaps the world, stage … And if a toast were to be drunk to absent friends then it would be to poor Dr. Rorschach and his ink blots’ (p. 543).
Several changes in the journal’s contents are evident in the 1970s. Reflecting the broader focus, fewer Rorschach papers appeared, and more journal space was devoted to studies using the TAT and the Object Relations Test (ORT). Speaking to the inescapable concerns about the validity of projective tests, studies with an experimental design became more common, quite in contrast to the society’s original commitment to case studies. The representation of men in the society also rose after 1968. At the December 1968 Annual General Meeting, just months after the International Rorschach Congress, one woman and seven men were elected onto the committee of the new British Rorschach Forum and Society for Projective Techniques. Women never again made up a majority of the committee. From 1968, a greater proportion of articles were contributed from overseas countries including India, the US, Canada, and Spain. This pattern continued for decades and in his 1989 editorial Mahmood, who edited the British Journal of Projective Techniques, after 1985 suggested the British readers should try to match the interest shown by their international colleagues.
By the 1980s, surveys began to show psychologists firmly moving away from projective techniques in Britain, as they had begun to do in the US. In 1987, Dr. L.F. Lowenstein published a literature review under the title ‘Are Projective Techniques Dead?’ in the British Journal of Projective Psychology. Referencing the survey of U.S. psychologists reported by Pruitt et al. (1985), Lowenstein argued that projective techniques were far from dead, but undeniably used much less frequently than in previous decades. Similarly, Mahmood (1984) described the Rorschach as more popular in several other countries—including the US—than in Britain. Also in the British Journal of Projective Psychology, Elias (1989) published a paper reviewing the projective scene in the US. Elias (1989) certainly referenced a ‘lessening of fervent interest in projective techniques’ (p. 33) in the US but maintained that projective tests remained very much in use in psychodynamic psychiatric and psychological centers. In relation to Rorschach criticism from Cronbach (1949) and Meehl (1954), he rightly predicted Exner’s work to be pivotal in continuation of the Rorschach in the US.
In 1988, Mahmood published research on the attitudes and opinions of society members (of which there were 48 in total). Of the 33 members who replied to his survey, only about onequarter of members frequently used projective tests and half used projective tests ‘occasionally.’ Ninety percent of members surveyed agreed that the use of projective tests had declined, and only 56 percent believed the tests had a future. Mahmood echoed this belief, describing one participant who believed that the use of projective tests had not declined as ‘an incurable optimist.’ Of the reasons for this decline, 83 percent reported that it was because of the changes in clinical psychology practice and in the roles of psychologists. They cited a focus away from assessment toward a focus on therapy, especially behavioral therapies with outpatient populations meaning that ‘the types of patients and problems referred to them … do not require a traditional diagnostic assessment’ (Mahmood, 1988). Only 23 percent of respondents reported that the decline of the use of projective tests was due to their nonscientific status. Specifically Mahmood argued that the Rorschach and the TAT had fared the worst from this decline, but that the Lowenfeld World Technique (Lowenfeld, 1979), Lowenfeld Mosaic Test (Lowenfeld, 1954), and the ORT (Phillipson, 1955) continued to be used.
In the same year, the title of the journal was changed to British Journal of Projective Psychology under which it continued until 1997, with Mahmood as editor until 1995. Mahmood (1988) stated that contributors needed to demonstrate projective tests’ usefulness in modern psychology so that projective techniques did not become ‘nothing but a blot on the landscape of Psychology.’ However, there were few successes in convincing others of the utility of the Rorschach test in Britain after 1988. Again, this situation contrasts with the boost to projective testing that occurred in forensic psychology in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the US (Wood et al., 2003). Peterson, Johanson, and Waller (1993) reported survey findings showing that members of the US based Society of Personality Assessment viewed the Rorschach and the MMPI as equal in psychometric status. In contrast to the US, there was little revival of the Rorschach after this point in Britain, however a small amount of Rorschach work continued at the Tavistock into the twenty-first century (McCarthy Woods, 2008).
Conclusion
In this article, we have examined Rorschach testing in two different national contexts in the twentieth century
In contrast to the Rorschach’s remarkable popularity in the US, in Britain the Rorschach was confined to a very small group. Several external factors contribute to explaining this difference. Clinical psychology was less firmly established in Britain than the US before the Second World War. During the war, military investment in the projective hypothesis in the US credentialized the use of the test in the management of the army’s mental health. During the period of growth in clinical psychology after the Second World War, the Rorschach was embedded in training and practice in the US but was ruled out of the Maudsley, the first and most influential training school in Britain. The Rorschach was frequently researched in the well-funded discipline of scientific psychology in the US, but university academics with interests in the Rorschach in Britain were extremely rare. The Rorschach in Britain, much like the women whose work is so important to its history, remained marginalized but significant. Within this national context, the fascination that Rorschach’s ink blots engendered was not sufficient to stabilize belief its legitimacy, nor its widespread use.
From this marginal position, British Rorschach research may have been less influential than its American counterparts, but from contemporary perspectives it was not necessarily worse. Historians of psychology have been deeply concerned with the question of how women who are marginalized from the mainstream might generate novel forms of psychological understanding (Morawski & Agronick, 1991). The British women engaged in Rorschach research did not share U.S. psychology’s Cold War concerns, which provided the political capital to invest so heavily in the discipline in the first place. Consequently, different accounts of some forms of difference, notably homosexuality, emerged from this context. Hegarty (2003) argued that Cold War Rorschach testers in the US could articulate psychological experiences distinct to gay men that later lesbian/gay-affirmative approaches forgot, but only within a pathologizing framework of difference. In Britain, where the Rorschach was not caught up in such state-sponsored surveillance of sexuality, Hopkins could use the test to articulate a distinct and largely positive lesbian psychology that early lesbian/gay-affirmative psychologies in the US failed to assimilate. This example alone suggests that the careers and output of these British women in this Rorschach network are worthy of further study.
This history then not only details events in Britain, but casts into relief distinct features of psychology’s history in the US, which are not replicated in other countries; the extent of collaboration with the military in the Second World War, Cold War concerns about homosexuality, massive state-sponsored investment in the social sciences, and the growth of the professional schools from the 1970s. Such events have framed our understanding of the history of the Rorschach. In the US, both the projective test movement and its empiricist critics have been strong constituencies, and battles continue over the ‘projective hypothesis’ and its validity in courts of law (Wood et al., 2003). In Britain, however, the critics dominated leaving little room for debate. By considering the contrasting case where Rorschach testing was never nationalized, this study shows how influential training institutes, nationalized health systems, and professional bodies can influence investment in the ‘projective hypothesis.’ We hope to have shown here how the history of Rorschach testing can develop from histories written by ‘insiders’ to explanatory accounts of faith and doubt in the power of the test. We would urge histories of the Rorschach to become international by focusing on how such institutions work and determine who can test whom and to what effect. Such a comparative approach also goes some way to begin to internationalize the history of psychology and remove the ‘norm’ discourse that surrounds American-centric histories.