Mónica Guinzbourg de Braude. Rorschachiana. Volume 29, Issue 1. Hogrefe & Huber Publishers. 2008.
Many questions have been asked about the origin of Rorschach’s pictures. The author himself, however, offered little information about how he built the stimulus. When introducing the method, Rorschach mentioned that the blots had been generated by drops of ink that expand symmetrically on account of the center fold of the page; he insisted they were simple, not complex, figures. Besides that, the blots had to fulfill some requirements as regards composition or a peculiar spatial rhythm to ensure their flexibility.
Surprisingly, neither time nor cultural differences have rendered the potential stimulus of Rorschach’s blots out-dated or irrelevant. It is ever pertinent.
Exner (2000) went through notes, writings, drawings, drafts, even experimental blots, and he realized that Rorschach’s inkblots are not actually ink-blots. They are carefully drawn pictures, created by Rorschach.
“It seems quite obvious that the drawings were inspired by inkblots made by Rorschach and the drawings they include came from Rorschach’s ideas and his artistic skills. On the basis of these findings, it is no overstatement to say that Rorschach deliberately created obvious traits in each one of the pictures” (Exner, 2000, p. 3).
Having stated this hypothesis, we believe these are not “mere accidental” blots; rather, they are “special” blots. They have a long history and, therefore, were not haphazardly chosen.
Why are things seen as they are seen?
The Method
When Rorschach presented his method in 1921, he explained that the point was to interpret accidental shapes. His theory as regards the stimulus and its effect was that the resulting response was built through integrating mnemonic images with the impressions generated by the pictures used as a stimulus. This means that the subject is clearly conscious that the blot is not identical to the objects stored in his memory. This accounts for the fact that the answering process demands his willingness to identify the blots or some areas within them as something that actually it is not, though it does show some similarity.
Fantasy or imagination are not ruled out, given the very thin line dividing recognition of the pictures from interpretation of their meaning.
He defines the “method” as a testing instrument based on perception, visual in this case. The term “interpretation’ is used to define the subject’s deliberate action. Reaction to the stimulus requires the subject to be able to discern fantasy from reality, and acknowledge that the latter is not represented by the blot in the picture. In any case, the fact is that they are, actually, “blots.” Building upon whatever is perceived, interpretation implies giving meanings, based on perceptual frames of elements belonging, through some similarity, to real life.
Despite Rorschach’s insistence that the blots did not represent anything in particular, the task of “seeing what is represented” is built into the instruction: “What do you see here?” This is why during some period of time, and before the reply can be framed into words, there is a varied process of recognition of the blot. The task of “seeing in” involves “de-identifying” the stimulus and there is often more than one alternative answer.
Framing the Question
According to Exner (1994), once the card has been shown a large number of “false” identifications and potential replies come up. At this point, it is relevant to inquire about these false images or false identifications. Are they really false images or potential replies?
A complex issue in the situation faced by the patient taking the test, is to select between the potential replies to be framed in words and those that must be ignored.
In fact, the stimulus and the need to de-codify its meaning, lead the subject through a complex set of psychological operations that will reach their climax in the choice and verbalization of the answer. In achieving this, the subject undergoes successive processes of analysis and synthesis of the different parts. Some are excluded in order to formulate the word that will include the meaning; this concept should identify whatever he saw in the blot with objects from real life and included in his memory, often based on emotional experience. According to Gombrich (1959), even if representative signs refer to objects in our visible world, attributable meanings can never be “given” by themselves. The representation of an unknown animal or building will mean nothing to us with or through its size, unless another, familiar object prompts us to appreciate it and connect it on scale, i.e., recall it through “likeness.” Let us take a bat or a butterfly. The action of classifying through perception implies activating the mental system, whereby I place one of them among other butterflies I have seen, known, dreamt of, etc. This is what interpretation of meanings is about.
Causing it to work requires the characteristics of the stimulus to trigger this process based on data provided by perception. According to Rorschach, perception may be seen as an associative integration of preexistent engrams (mnemonic images) with recent sense complexes. The interpretation of accidental shapes may therefore be classified as perception requiring a significant effort of integration between the sense complex and the engram. This is how the subject perceives it intra-psychically. In view of what has been said, there must be a threshold beyond which perception becomes interpretation. That is why not every response can be taken as an “interpretation.”
Where the threshold dividing perception from interpretation is lower, as with simpler and more commonplace perception, most subjects are conscious of the effort implied in integration, but others may not be ready to cope with such process on account of the energy and toil it demands.
On the other hand, it is a fact that subjects differ as regards their possibilities of assimilating or integrating impressions from stimuli with preexistent engrams. These traits, related as they are to individual variability, constitute distinctive aspects of personality. In Ehrenzweig’s words, “we mostly tend to perceive simple shapes, compact and precise, while simultaneously eliminating vague, inconsistent and inarticulate shapes from our perception” (Gombrich, 1959, p. 23)
This selective characteristic of our perception may have led Rorschach to give a simple design to his blots, trying to build some of them as compact and pure. On the other hand, he also made other scarcely configured ones, less precise, more ambiguous. These call for a stronger effort at integration and allow for inverting the usual approach and focus on elements that come up accidentally or insignificantly in the blot. They are included, actually, to foster replies that will deepen integration and express personal resources more clearly.
By this means, Rorschach tapped on “ambiguity” to open up the reading of the cards. This is connected to the fact that there is no single answer for each blot. On the other hand, it encourages creative conscience to go down to the deepest levels of the brain, opening the way to phenomena lodged in the unconscious.
A further aspect considered by Rorschach in the construction of the inkblots is that they should be symmetrical. Bearing that in mind, the author talks about the fold down the middle of the blot. Its purpose is to avoid that the “interruption of the sense of balance provided by symmetry should cause rejection among the people interviewed” ( Rorschach, 1921, p. 25). Although the blots may show some insignificant differences between each half, they are not conspicuous enough to interfere with the notion of rhythm.
All these details lead us to believe that, beyond the perception phenomena he may have found in the Gestalt theory and in apperception, the author was aware of the complexities of the mental processes involved both in decoding the meaning of the blot and in its formulation with the purpose of stimulating such processes. It is worth noting that Rorschach included something beyond shape in the blots. In fact, he added visual stimuli that will activate other sensorial channels such as touch, derived from the visual field and, especially, the importance of color and shades insofar as they create the notion of perspective and/or deepness.
According to Hildebrand (Gombrich, 1959, p. 29), “if we try to analyse our mental images in order to pin down their basic components, we shall find they are made up of sense data derived from visions and memories of touch and movement. Touch tells us about the properties of space and shape. Not only visual images, but also memories connected to the sense of touch allow for our mental reconstruction of tridimensional shapes.”
When making his blots, Rorschach tapped on the sense processes of perception, particularly texture, color and shape, that form the basis of the visual construction of concepts and constituents that underlie the visual image.
On Rorschach’s Connection with Painting and Its Probable Influence in the Conception of the Inkblots
An article by Wolfgang Schwarz (1996) provided interesting information to help reconstruct the mysterious life and work of the author. The first relevant fact provided by the article was the Rorschach family tree. Very elaborately drawn up by Rorschach himself on heavy paper; it is described as richly illustrated. According to the article, it was Rorschach’s Christmas present to his brother Paul in 1919. The second significant information is that Rorschach’s father was a painter, who taught in the Royal School. We can reasonably presume that exposure to pictures and works of art was part of everyday life in the Rorschach’s family. This would obviously entail appreciation and knowledge of visual images. The author mentions that Rorschach has left a large number of drawings, particularly a sizeable amount of charcoal portraits. It would seem that images, among which he included photographs, were regularly focused.
The author describes Rorschach as gifted with great creative freedom, imaginative and a lover of drama and pantomime.
Are “Accidental Shapes” Haphazard Blots or Do They Have a Connection with Some Form of Esthetic Expression in Visual Art?
In most cultures, referring to images in connection with haphazard shapes is little more than an oddity in the fringes of art.
From the point of view of art itself, reality cannot be represented but merely “suggested.” What a visual image offers is not a “representation” of reality, but an “illusion” of that same reality. It is thus interesting to “recover our feeling of awe at man’s ability to depict through shapes or lines, shades or colors, those mysterious ghosts of visual reality that we name ‘images’ or ‘pictures’” (Gombrich, 1959, p. 23).
As regards haphazard shapes it is worth noting that, unless an artisan has introduced a stone or a piece in the correct place to complete the image, few artists will pay attention to such shapes or hazardous forms.
Contrariwise, this is not the case with the treatment of haphazard shapes as they come up in Rorschach’s cards as well as their effect on the blots in the test .. . “some of the traits in the blots are crucial for shaping prospective responses: details or parts of the blots with higher chances of belonging to a peculiar group of objects” (Exner, 1994, p. 38).
Historical Contributions to the Projection in the Blots Phenomenon
“You should watch walls with damp stains or stones of different colors. If you must invent backgrounds, they will provide divine landscapes, adorned by mountains, rocks, ruins, forests, wide plains, and a huge variety of hills and valleys and, later, you will also see battles and weird shapes in violent actions, facial expressions and clothes and countless things that you can bring down to their complete and appropriate shapes. Such walls are like the chiming of bells in whose rhythm you will find any articulate word you may conceive of.” Leonardo Da Vinci (1993)
The history of art shows that the value of “projection” in connection with stains was discovered by various landscape painters in different parts of the world. Leonardo invented the deliberately blurred image; he deemed it lowered the information contributed by the canvas and, thus, fostered the mechanism of projection.
Indefinite parts of the canvas will turn into a screen, provided some clear traits stand out strongly enough and no contradictory image reaches the eye to shatter the impression.
Nevertheless, we do not all possess the same “mental equipment” that will lead us to project: A projection-prone attitude induces us to extend the tentacles of ghost colors and images which surround our perception. We all have a wide range of information on different things we may have seen; images recalled by the screen and prompted by signs from those images, to which we pay enough attention as to notice their traits … but that mental equipment is not equally developed in all of us … (Exner, 1994, p. 27).
And the reason is that before “decoding” images, we must “perceive connections” (Gombrich, 1959, p. 48).
According to Gombrich many art processes apply the “switching on” and “switching off” principle: a reordering of embroidering or lace in which the holes of the pattern are filled or left empty, producing perfect images … It is irrelevant whether the filled squares are “shapes” or “background”; the only thing that matters is “the connection between both signals” (Gombrich, 1959, p. 48).
Ink-blots and Their Connection with Literary Creation
With some writers, it would seem that both poetic and pictorial languages are interrelated and mutually stimulated. We are aware that poetry taps on words to create visual, tactile, aural images in the reader. Word and image, as combined in a poem, were motivating resources in the literary production of some of the greatest writers and poets.
Some art-historians have claimed that Dostoyevsky, Goethe, and Victor Hugo, for example, used the blot-technique before Rorschach.
Victor Hugo frequently used it, especially between 1848-1850, in the fringe of several of his literary works.
Once the page is folded down the middle, the blot produces a symmetrical composition. Some of them show a carefully designed outline. Specialists in restoration have assessed that drawings were made with pen, ink and blots with watercolors or so-called “gouache,” ink of different colors, alternately with black ink. Some of the blots are “kaleidoscopic.”
Upon introducing the work of Victor Hugo, Judith Petit (1986) adds:
“This is not the place to present Rorschach’s test about which we can say, in an oversimplification, that for the doctor or psychologist it means exposing the patient to stimuli made up of symmetric blots and interpreting his responses. Leafing through some of the blots connected to the test, one is impressed by the repetition of expressions such as ‘day-dreaming-imagining-reverie’ and by recurrent responses referring to a butterfly or a gnome … Hugo is, therefore, a predecessor or he experimented, before Rorschach, with the blots and their reading as a regular expression of the human spirit” (p. 118)
The History of the Blots is Even Older
Though usually associated with the Romantic writers mentioned above and considered by Leonardo before them, they actually originated in the East.
The Chinese painting tradition not only speculates about focusing on some conspicuous presence in the blot, which is one of the criteria included by Rorschach; it also underscores “absences” or the expression of the “invisible.” It states that “even if no eyes have been painted on figures, it must seem that they are looking …, though they may have no ears, it must look as if they were listening …” According to Chinese thought, these traits would “beckon” the onlooker to “complete and project.” “The real wonder of the eye is precisely the speed and firmness with which it interprets the interaction of an infinite number of signs” (Gombrich, 1959, p. 238). It therefore seems quite clear “that some parts of the field of stimuli are much more similar than others to real and imaginary objects; consequently, it is much easier to classify or ‘de-identify’ them” (Exner, 1994, p. 37).
Apparently, painters in the Sung dynasty exerted the strongest influence in building visual images.
During approximately three centuries, between 960 and 1279, China underwent politically troubled times but it also experienced an unparalleled development in the field of art: this was actually a golden era for painting. Interestingly, besides painters, political leaders of the time, including the emperor himself, were well acquainted with calligraphy, painting and poetry, all of them interrelated.
Some painters introduced the technique of “overlapping images,” “stumped” dots and “vacuum dynamics.” They also invented a noncentered perspective: by focusing on a particular angle of the landscape it led the imaginary onlooker toward something not explicitly expressed and nostalgic, invisible, but that became the core of the work of art.
The most interesting similarity connected to inkblots can thus be traced to China, where Sung-Ti, an eleventh century artist, described a blot technique very close to the one used by Rorschach in his cards. We can presume that the basic contributions from Chinese painting reached the West through Marco Polo’s voyages. It is quite likely that, besides silk, pottery and sculpture, he should have brought the first samples of Chinese painting.
At the beginning, Chinese painters followed traditional criteria of landscape painting, based on the use of inkblots in different shades of grey. They gradually focused on the quest for the notion of perspective, placing objects unevenly on the canvas.
In a fairly later period, Kuan, one of the last Sung masters, tried to go deeper into the use of perspective through variations in the deepness of the colors employed.
The use of a paintbrush with strong slabs of paint was meant to create a feeling of distancing as well as deepness. Results were achieved by means of qualitative changes in the use of the paintbrush technique. They were aimed at granting harmony to the whole work through underscoring, interrupting and breaking up strokes, besides using various shades of grey, light and shade and black with a mere incidental use of color. Artists gradually freed themselves from reproducing stimuli and admitted that their work showed, rather, whatever such stimuli had caused the artist to feel. This meant paying less attention to technical skills than to the author’s ability to transmit more subjective feelings and impressions. Consequently, they used watercolors with lighter and darker colors.
These changes marked an evolution toward literary painting borrowed from calligraphy; the rationale behind it being that the painter could express his emotions through abstract calligraphic forms. Painters of that period started privileging message over technique, which fostered controversial opinions that last up to the present.
Paintings became less conventional and more dynamic, colorful, and included living beings in landscapes. At first it was animals, then moving human beings were added. Subject matter was influenced by philosophical thinking from Buddhism and Taoism.
On the Relationship Between Creator and Spectator
The use of broken lines where blank space comes in between them, forced artists to deepen their synthetic capacities while offering the spectator the chance of adding the imaginary line to complete the vision of what he saw and granting it meaning.
The blot or illusion thus became a mediator between author and onlooker.
Eighteenth century art critics underscored the notion of the relationship between image and spectator. That is why we witness the emergence of a psychological theory of painting that focuses on the interplay between artist and spectator …
In order to establish this subjective connection between artist and onlooker, any representation somehow trusts that the stimulus will contribute to create or foster a “guided projection” that will lead to understand the “symbolic material,” namely, the meaning included in the image.
“It is an art form in which the artist’s skill at suggesting must be paralleled by the capacity of the public to grasp insinuations from the work in question” (Gombrich, 1959, p. 174)
Responses will come when the spectator has no doubts about how to proceed to complete the image he sees. This requires an empty or not fully defined area on which he may project the expected image and pass judgment accordingly. Very probably, some of these notions were part of Rorschach’s intention when producing and selecting his cards.
His production of the blots was influenced not only by his theoretical and esthetic knowledge but also by his practical drawing skills. In fact, according to art critics, “from a pictorial point of view producing or drawing an unusual vision sets obstacles far stronger than what is usually believed” (Gombrich, 1959, p. 48).
We can reasonably presume that every trend we have mentioned up to now had a say in Rorschach’s inspiration. The recorded steps in the history and production of blots in China as from the ninth century, Leonardo’s findings and, probably, the strong influence of Chinese culture in the West and on nineteenth century Impressionists. In the case of the latter, it was actually re-enacted in Surrealist automatism. We should also recall the impact of the discoveries and tenets held by psychoanalysis and the philosophical and esthetic movement that flourished in Zurich in Rorschach’s time.
It might be presumed, therefore, that his “method” might have resulted from a conscious choice of a line of research.
Just as the study of poetry would be incomplete without a solid knowledge of the language of prose; art should be ever more often accompanied by research on the linguistics of visual images.
It is highly likely that Rorschach knew something about this language and this knowledge seeped into the blots. This would imply that he achieved to join several traits of his own personality -qua painter and psychiatrist-that only stresses the richness of his creative spirit. His method, therefore, was the result of the blots originated in his experiences connected to painting, his discovery of stumps, vacuum and the “accidental shapes” as ideal stimuli for the subjects’ personality to come up through their perception as “observers” as well as their vision of an ambiguous stimulus, albeit capable of repetition in different time sequences in order to watch out for consistency in responses. Moreover, his vision as a researcher led him to plan future experiences connected to imagining nonsymmetrical blots and their influence on responses; parallel shapes that allowed further testing of the accuracy of the instrument used.
All these notions proved that research was only starting.