Carl-Erik Mattlar & Risto Fried. Rorschachiana. Volume 18, Issue 1, 1993.
According to the Finnish Psychological Association (Dufva, Huttunen, Härsilä, Kauppinen & Kentala, 1979), the Rorschach is, in Finland as in the U. S. (Piotrowski, 1984; Ritzler & Del Gaudio, 1976; Weiner, 1983), the personality test most used in psycho diagnostic assessment, with the Wartegg in second place. This holds true for hospitals, mental health clinics, psychiatric clinics, child guidance centers and university student health services. Psychological consultants also use it in making personnel decisions. The Rorschach usually forms part of a test battery that may also include the WAIS or WISC, drawing tests, a picture story method (CAT, TAT, ORT, or revised Finnish version of the Shneidman MAPS) and objective personality tests. The Rorschach’s preeminence is remarkable in view of negative attitudes encountered in academic circles, and the resultant fact that a degree in psychology by no means entails competence in projective testing. In the opinion of Finnish Rorschach pioneer Aarre Tuompo (1947), it was necessary for a Finn who wanted to master the Rorschach to travel to Switzerland. Not until 1968 was an annual course devoted entirely to the Rorschach included in the curriculum of a Finnish university (Jyväskylä), and it remains the only one.
To augment their inadequate formal schooling, Finnish clinical psychologists have shown persistent initiative in organizing basic Rorschach courses and advanced seminars throughout the country. In 1971, Stephen A. Appelbaum of the Menninger Clinic was invited to hold an intensive Rorschach course. In the 1980’s, Rorschach summer courses were held at Oulu University’s biological research stations at the lighthouse on Hailuoto island and near the waterfalls in Oulanka National Park. Probably the world’s northernmost Rorschach seminar was held in the Lapland community of Sodankylä, annual site of the Midnight Sun Film Festival (Fried, 1978).
At the time of writing, inquiries sent to universities in neighboring countries indicate that Finland leads northern Europe in Rorschach research. In Russia, where Hermann Rorschach lived and worked in 1913-1914, his test still is not forgotten, but to obtain training, or even a set of the cards, was virtually impossible during the Soviet period. It is less obvious why Finland should have been more active in use of the Rorschach than her Scandinavian neighbors to the west. Recently Swedish psychologists have called in Finnish experts for teaching and consultation, a situation unforeseeable in Tuompo’s days.
The first Rorschach plates used in Finland, as far as has been possible to determine, were in possession of the University of Helsinki in 1932. With the aid of Kai v. Fieandt (later a professor and prominent in cognitive research), K. Helasvuo (1934, 1936) wrote his Master’s thesis on the Rorschach responses of male convicts in the Helsinki prison. According to Tuompo, other Rorschach studies performed during this pre-war period remained unpublished.
Depression in Front Line Soldiers
The first Finnish Rorschach study published in an international journal was Aarre Tuompo’s (1947) comparison of combat servicemen with peacetime civilians. Tuompo commanded a battery on the Karelian front. After suffering heavy losses in 1941, his unit was shifted to a relatively quiet sector. Tuompo, assisted by his medical officer, made use of this lull to test 110 artillerymen (mean age 28) with the Rorschach. Returned to civilian life as a teacher in a rural area much like that from which his soldiers had been recruited, he tested a control group from among his pupils (137 men and women, mean age 18). His principal finding was that the servicemen as a group showed signs of depression as manifested in card rejections, achromatic and shading responses, detail rather than whole human responses, and morbid content (corpses, wounded men, blood, graves marked by crosses).
That men who had recently lost comrades, who were separated from their loved ones, and who lived under threat of injury or death, should show signs of depression ought not to be surprising. Yet the hero stereotype is so well established that one tends to associate clinical psycho-pathology only with the individual serviceman who breaks down, not with the majority who go about their duties. Tuompo’s dispassionate, carefully documented account therefore comes as something of an eye opener. One wonders if this study would have made a greater impact had it been published in a journal of psychiatry rather than for an audience of German speaking Rorschach specialists.
The Intentional Fallacy
In literary criticism, the assumption that a book’s meaning can be best understood in terms of what the author had intended to achieve is termed the “intentional fallacy.” The term may also be useful in assessment of scientific projects.
When Kiviluoto and Heikola (1974) embarked on their study of Finnish children’s Rorschach responses, they asserted that they wanted to free practicing psychologists from dependence on culture-specific U. S. norms. They tested 315 children aged 2.5 to 13 and published their findings in a book with over 300 pages of text, tables and charts. A surprising finding was that compared to the norms (Ames, Metraux, Rodell, & Walker, 1974; Ames, Métraux, & Walker, 1971) most relied on by Finnish psychologists, Finnish children consistently, at every age level, gave a higher mean total of responses. This contradicted the popular stereotype contrasting loquacious Americans with taciturn Finns. Since Ames et al.’s samples were skewed in the direction of higher than normal intelligence while Kiviluoto had scrupulously seen to it that her sample corresponded to a normal IQ distribution, this result seemed even more remarkable. The elevated response total affected norms for other scoring categories: Finnish children, compared with Americans, were found to have a lower W% and F+%, a higher A%.
Practicing psychologists were bewildered by these findings. The gap between test results obtained in practice and the new Finnish norms seemed far wider than had been the case with American norms. Did the lack of congruence stem from clinicians’ unfamiliarity with problem-free children? Did a child tested at a guidance center differ so radically from “normal” classmates?
In an attempt to resolve this question, Dufva, Huttunen, Härsilä, Kauppinen, and Kentala (1979) tested 184 7-10 year old children and 112 adults, evenly divided between subjects in psychiatric treatment and nonclinical subjects. Results on productiveness differed sharply from those obtained by Kiviluoto and Heikola: for subjects aged 7-8, mean R was 17 (Kiviluoto 30 R, Ames 17 R); for subjects aged 9-10, R was 22 (Kiviluoto 39 R, Ames 17 R). According to this study, the old American norms were more useful to Finnish psychologists than Kiviluoto and Heikola’s Finnish norms. Further, Dufva et al.’s findings were that differences between the “normal” and “clinical” samples, in terms of an item by item or “sign” approach to formal scoring, were small.
A likely solution to the puzzle set by the difference between the two Finnish studies was suggested by Exner’s (1974) data on the relationship between administration procedures and productiveness. In the Dufva et al. study, die subject was told, if only one response was volunteered to Card I, that it was possible to give more than one response. No further exhortations were given. Kiviluoto and Heikola, in their 1974 study, emphasize the importance of giving plentiful encouragement. Just how plentiful becomes apparent only if one goes back to Kiviluoto’s 1962 pilot study for a detailed account of the instructions given to testers: “The number of verbal encouragements (What else do you see? Tell me more!) was, however, for the sake of consistency, restricted to three in each picture” (p. 13). Dufva et al.’s subjects, then, were given the suggestion that they could give more responses one or zero times; Kiviluoto and Heikola’s subjects, 30 times. Kiviluoto and Heikola’s intentions had been to provide Finnish clinical psychologists with useful norms, and to provide data for cross-cultural (Finland-U. S.) comparison. Instead, quite unintentionally, they succeeded in giving an impressive example of the effect of Rorschach test instructions on productivity.
Universal Normal and Cultural Specificity
In work with adults, as with children, Finnish psychologists were confronted with the questionable adequacy of the norms they used. Klopfer (Klopfer & Kelley, 1946), while acknowledging differences between cultural groups, had expressed his confidence in the universal frequency of responses common to all ages and cultures, and acceptable to every “normal” subject (p. 177-178). The majority of clinical psychologists in post-war Finland used Klopfer’s norms. Norms were daily relied on in making such important decisions as whether a person was eligible for a pension, or in need of hospitalization. But the clinician rarely had experience with healthy normal people. Did a Finnish patient’s deviance from Klopfer’s American norms ensure psychopathology? Were Klopfer’s norms valid even for the U. S., seeing that his list of P responses, for example, differed from those of other Rorschach systemizers? More than other American Rorschach authorities, Klopfer relied on clinical experience (or, to put it less politely, on subjective memory) rather than on statistics. But, to stick with the question of P responses, none of the experts who did use statistics had collected anything resembling a representative sample.
In 1975, under the auspices of the National Social Insurance Institute, Carl-Erik Mattlar (1986) and his colleagues (Mattlar, Knuts, Alanen, 1987) contacted a random sample of 650 men and women, holding out the offer of a free medical examination to participants in psychological testing. All 5s were gainfully employed. They were equally divided into five age groups (20, 30, 40, 50, and 60) and resided in five medium sized towns in various regions of Finland. The number of actual participants was 407, of whom 181 were randomly assigned to individual and 226 to group Rorschach testing. All subjects were found to be in satisfactory physical and mental health, while intelligence testing yielded a group mean in the 100-110 IQ range. Additionally, a sample of 108 71-year-old pensioners was tested, as were two vocation-specific groups: 56 nursing students in their early twenties, and 51 engineers and technicians in their mid-twenties. The result of this effort was that Finland, with a population of five million, now had more adequate Rorschach norms for adults than any other country. The Finnish clinician, possessed of the new handbook, can take almost any feature (R, locations, determinants, principal content categories, Experience Balance and other ratios, P) of a protocol and check its absolute or perceptual occurrence against the means and standard deviations for the appropriate sex, age group, and manner (individual or group) of administration. But the handbook is useful for foreign as well as Finnish psychologists, as succeeding tables give mean values for important elements of the structural summary for 20 other normative studies, 4 Finnish and 16 from other European countries and the United States. Additionally, tables of P responses are given for Finland as compared with the six most used American and five European studies. Finally, there is a plate by plate listing of the content of all responses given by subjects in the various Finnish normal groups, from the most popular (100%) down to originals (1% of 622 subjects). Usefulness of these data is being further extended by rescoring in terms of Exner’s Comprehensive System, as well as retesting of original subjects to supply longitudinal data after 15 years.
There is a certain irony in the finding that Klopfer was not, after all, far afield in his assertion of “universality.” At least as concerns Europe and the U.S., it would seem that the principal elements of the structural summary could be described as “sturdy,” little affected by nationality. Within the Finnish normal sample, differences associated with age, gender, and intelligence were small. Compared with U.S. norms, the Finnish mean R (19.7) is close to what obtains for those Americans (Exner, 21.8; Klopfer, 23.9) who least pressure testees for quantity. The Finnish random sample was a little lower on M (1.8) than Exner’s normal adults (3.5). As regards P responses, the Finnish list is close to two-thirds identical with the American “consensus” list (Hertz, 1970; Exner, 1974) based on responses agreed on by three of six authors. The Finnish list comprises 14 items, and lacks 7 items from the U. S. list (e.g., butterfly or bow tie on III, human face on IX, rabbit’s head and caterpillar on X). The only Finnish P not found on any U. S. list is “Christmas elves” on Card II, a uniquely Fen no-Scandinavian response that has been investigated in some detail (Fried, 1981; 1990; Mattlar, 1986).
If the Rorschach elicits so many universal response patterns and so little that is culture specific, one could be skeptical about the utility of costly, time consuming normative studies. But it is only against the background of well-established norms mat one can appreciate and meaningfully investigate the diversity of group and individual responses within and between national cultures.
Take, for example, “two human beings” on Card III, one of the most popular Ps for both Finns (in Mattlar’s study, 100% of technicians, 86% of student nurses, 80% of individually tested 5s in the random sample) and Americans (82% of Exner’s non-psychiatric sample). The seeming cross-cultural accord is, however, only apparent. Schafer (1948, p. 156) flatly stated that the figures were male, and that to describe them as female was indicative of gender identity problems. Psychopathology or no, Americans have differed sharply (Brown, 1971; Hammer, 1966) as to the gender of the figures, while Finns of both sexes are virtually unanimous in describing them as female. The phenomenon under discussion is not restricted to information gleaned from the Rorschach. Keltikangas-Järvinen (1982) found that TAT Card 3BM, on which Americans divide fifty-fifty as to the gender of the figure portrayed, is clearly female for Finns. In administering the Shneidman MAPS, with its choice of 67 figures, psychologists found themselves stymied when Finnish testees protested that there was no adequate “Mother” Figure. Dufva et al. (1979), with new female figures drawn progressively shorter and less slender than the originals, found that 75% of subjects preferred the more obese Figures. To return to Card III, it was selected as best depicting “Mother” by 24.6% of 1089 Finns individually tested with the Rorschach (Fried, 1990), while 205 Americans gave First choice (26.3%) to Card VII, which in Finland came in a poor second (15.5%). There was no cross-cultural difference in choice of a “Father” card, with both Finns (23.9%) and Americans (26.0%) giving first place to the traditional (Meer & Singer, 1950) Card IV. Findings like this one, suggestive of concepts of femininity and maternity that differ in Finnish and American cultures, are intriguing because they involve cognitive-emotional processes evocable by pictorial stimuli, but hard to explain or elicit in words. Rorschach psychology may here be capable of making a unique contribution.
Clinical and Normal: Redrawing the Boundaries
In far too many Rorschach studies, “normal” has been a wastebasket category defined only in negative terms, like not being in psychiatric treatment. A more demanding definition of normality was developed in conjunction with the University Student Health Service (Holmström, Jussila, & Vauhkonen, 1987), when it was decided to implement a thorough psychiatric and psychodiagnostic examination of a major random sample of university students. Each student was interviewed by six psychoanalytically trained psychiatrists. Not only was present functioning assessed, but subjects were followed up over a twenty year period to determine whether their life courses substantiated the original impression (Holmström, 1989). Tested with the Rorschach and compared both with Finnish (Mattlar, 1986) and American (Exner, 1986) healthy reference groups, 22 women and 17 men, initially judged to be the healthiest members of the sample, now 40 years old, were indeed found (Mattlar, Holmström, Hanses, Uotila, & Alanen, 1990) to be self-actualizers with potential for fulfilling their basic needs through use of inner resources as well as interaction with the external world. They were characterized by diversity and richness of personality, stress tolerance, ability to master overwhelming stimulation, and sound self-esteem. Compared to controls, who were reticent and overly careful, they dared to take calculated risks in achieving maximal enjoyment of life.
With respect to the Affective Ratio (Afr), the healthy group achieved a higher value than the Finnish controls, but lower than the Americans. This seems consistent with the observation that the American “cocktail party” attitude of lightly controlled spontaneity is foreign to the Finnish life style, which allows of less gradations between being stone cold sober or riotously drunk.
In a companion study (Mattlar, Ruth, & Knuts, 1980-1981; Mattlar, 1986; Ruth, 1980), 407 Rorschach protocols were evaluated for creativeness as defined in terms of fluency, flexibility, and originality. Peak creativity was achieved by men in their forties and women in their twenties, possibly a function of increased educational and vocational opportunities for women in recent years. No appreciable drop-off was noted, however, even between ages 50 and 60.
Rorschach testing has, indeed, revised attitudes toward aging. As late as 1974, W. Klopfer characterized gerontological Rorschach protocols as showing signs of severe impairment: intellectual inefficiency, emotional instability, and lowered self-esteem. Though Klopfer was aware that non-institutionalized elderly subjects were not so different from younger age groups, data were generally collected from hospitals and homes for the aged. An adequate random sample of 71-year-olds (Mattlar 1986; Mattlar, Knuts, & Virtanen,1985; Mattlar, Carlsson, Forsander, Karppi, & Helenius, 1991) living at home revealed that they differed markedly little from younger groups. For the majority, energy resources, level of percept formation, critical thinking, sense of reality, social awareness, and capacity for emotional response were intact. An ongoing (Mattlar, Carlsson, Forsander, Norrlund, Karppi, Helenius, & Make, in preparation) study of non-patient octogenarians confirms results arrived at in France (Poitrenaud & Moreaux, 1975): although difficulties in perception-mediational functioning and signs of depression have increased, about half still have a personality structure comparable with that of non-patient adults.
Related to the question of personality deterioration with advancing age is that of cerebral dysfunction. Piotrowski (1937) accomplished the first Rorschach scale for evaluating cerebral dysfunction in terms of impaired percept formation. After decades of research, the Piotrowski scale has continued to lead the field (Goldfried, Strieker, & Weiner, 1971; Lezak, 1976/83). It produces few false positives and a score of 5 or more usually discloses cerebral impairment. The question has remained whether the test’s sensitivity results in high scores being prevalent even in the general population. Using data from the Finnish random sample (Mattlar, 1986), it was found (Mattlar, Knuts & Alanen, 1986) that scores of more than 5 were rare up to age 40, but characterized every fourth 50-year-old and every third 60-year-old. Association with intelligence (excepting the WAIS Digit Symbol subtest) was slight, but factor analysis revealed three factors: (a) impaired speed of perception formation; (b) hesitancy, rigidity; and (c) difficulty in coping with emotion. These were individuals, however, who complained of no disease and functioned relatively well in the community. The phenomenon may hence be associated with normal biological aging or due to small cardiovascular incidents from which one thinks one has recovered. As Piotrowski himself (1937) was careful to point out, a high score need not signify major impairment, but must be interpreted in the context of the entire Rorschach record.
Clinical Studies
Confronted by a major dilemma, the optimist asserts that the situation is serious, but not hopeless, whereas the cynic smiles that it is hopeless, but not serious. Depending on one’s point of view, it may seem a tragic, or merely an absurd, waste of resources that thousands of Rorschach records are locked away in the files of hospitals and clinics while the researcher interested in a specific diagnostic group must laboriously search out and test enough individuals to accumulate a sample big enough—just and just—to satisfy the demands of statistical credibility. In Finland and Sweden, institution of Rorschach Workshops and changeover to the Comprehensive System (Exner 1986, 1990, 1991) aims at becoming part of a world-wide data bank that will enable the clinician of the future, each time a Rorschach has been administered, to deposit its contents in the bank, receiving in return a ready written diagnostic report based on all reference groups pertinent to the case just deposited. But while waiting for the millennium (only 8 more years to 2000 A. D.), Rorschach psychologists must make do with research results based on relatively small groups.
Using psychiatric interviews and the consensus Rorschach, Alanen and Kinnunen (1974) studied the relationships of 30 couples in which one spouse had become schizophrenic subsequent to marriage. They distinguished three basic types: (a) a dependent, passive schizophrenic spouse with a pathogenic, dominant partner; (b) schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic partners in a relationship of mutual symbiotic clinging; and (c) a dominating schizophrenic spouse with a more realistic, but dependent partner. Findings indicated that the first type of relationship benefited more from individual than from couples therapy. The second and third types, with a better overall prognosis, gained from couples therapy.
Keltikangas-Järvinen (1984) and her associates (e.g., Keltikangas-Järvinen, Ruokolainen, & Lehtonen, 1982; Keltikangas-Järvinen, Mueller, & Lehtonen, 1989) have used content scales to demonstrate that chronic prostatitis sufferers showed personality defects possibly associated with disturbed interpersonal relationships in infancy. Following up patients’ responses to surgery, they found (Keltikangas-Järvinen, Loven, & Möller, 1984) that longterm adaptation was better for ileostomy than for colostomy.
Results of in-patient treatment for borderline patients have been investigated (Antikainen, 1990) using the Lerner Defense Scale. While there was no difference in frequency of resort to primitive defenses (devaluation, idealization, denial) at beginning and end of treatment, there was a tendency for these defenses to be used in less extreme forms. This suggests that, while brief treatment did not change essential personality pathology, it resulted in better capacity for adjustment and coping.
Wahlström (1987) used the Concensus Rorschach to test the hypothesis that a pattern of interaction specific to psychosomatic families characterized families with an asthmatic child. He found not one, but several divergent patterns.
Other studies of dysfunctional groups have focused on obesity (Ihanus, Keltikangas-Järvinen, & Mustajoki, 1986; Mattlar, Salminen, & Alanen, 1989; Mattlar, Carlsson, Salminen, Vesala, Mäki, & Alanen, 1990); intermittent claudication (Keltikangas-Järvinen, Lepantalo, & Lindfors, 1987; Keltikangas-Järvinen, Lidfors, & Lepantalo, 1987); interstitial cystitis (Keltikangas-Järvinen, Auvinen, & Lehtonen, 1988); personality differences between good and poor sleepers (Mattlar & Kronholm, 1990; Mattlar, Carlsson, Kronholm, Rytöhonka, Santasalo, Hyyppä, Mäki, & Alanen, 1991); families with an alcohol problem (Fried, Halme, Jalonen, Keskitalo, & Suokas, 1983); and various cerebral lesions (Vilkki, 1978, 1981, 1987).
Further, there have been case studies exploring the sensation of flying in Rorschach responses, dreams and behavior as related to fantasized omnipotence, and fears of falling or loss of ego cohesion in skyjackers and faith healers (Fried, 1980, 1982, 1984; Fried, Rantasila, Reinikainen, Malkavaara-Kallinen, & Huttunen, 1988; Fried & Reinikainen, 1983).
The Cookbook and the Jungle
When interpreting content in a Rorschach record, many clinicians commit either of two sins: reliance on ready-made conclusions furnished by an authority (the “cookbook” approach), or giving their own intuitions free play (“wild analysis”). Though these may seem like opposite extremes, they have in common uncritical acceptance of conclusions that have not been checked out against the Highest Authority: the testee.
Anne Lyytinen and Riitta Nortala (1987) investigated the adequacy of well-thumbed cookbooks, such as Phillips and Smith (1953), for gaining an understanding of animal responses of Finnish first year university students. Most of the cookbook writers fared quite well, in the sense that a majority of subjects usually expressed feelings that coincided with the standard interpretation. There was, however, a great deal of variation even within Lyytinen and Nortala’s relatively small (n = 40) and homogeneous sample. First, it was found that whereas affective response to some animals was near-unanimous (rats were loathsome), others provoked markedly different responses in different subjects (lions as frightening or as noble, highly admired animals). A bear reminded a student from an urban area of the teddy bear to which she clung for security when going to sleep as a child; a student from Lapland saw bears as cruel predators that endanger reindeer herders’ livelihood. In addition to inter-subject variability, there was intra-subject variability, as measured by a scale for ambivalence and intensity of feeling. The reasons underlying inconsistent reaction to a particular animal became clearer through free verbalizations. Subjects frequently began with adult, rational attitudes based on knowledge (wolves as an endangered species in need of protection), then revealed contradictory attitudes based on childhood emotion. One man, for example, described bats as useful destroyers of harmful insects, then continued “This bat seems to be looking (white spaces on Card I as eyes) right at me—but why should I be afraid? I’m not an insect.”
A third factor in variability resided in interaction between subjective responses and the stimulus properties of the cards. Many Rorschach psychologists consider bat and butterfly responses to I and V as equivalent, and diagnostically uninformative, responses. Lyytinen and Nortala found that most subjects connected the bat on V, small and with good form-concept fit, with more positive feelings than the big, dark, dysphoric and “mystical” bat on I. A butterfly on III was apperceived as cheerful and carefree, but a butterfly on I or V, because of the dissonance between the card’s form and blackness and what a butterfly should be, aroused anxious and depressive feeling even more than a bat response to the same card. Phillips and Smith’s interpretation of spiders as “dominating and possessive mother figures” (p. 122) received support when a spider had been perceived in an unusual area, but not for the P spider on X, where the response can be “read” from die card without personal involvement. Generally, then, the meaning of A responses did not reside in the concept of an animal per se, but in its interrelationship with each card’s unique properties. Even this rule, however, was not always useful, as some subjects were so preoccupied with a problem (e.g., achieving independence from home) that they repeatedly expressed it, using any animal on any card as a mere vehicle for their overriding concern. Lyytinen and Nortala’s investigation, then, reminds us of what we should have known all along: die content of a response deserves inquiry as careful as that accorded locations and determinants. The psychologist should never assume that he or she knows what the testee has in mind without needing to ask.
When Not to Use the Rorschach
A patient repeatedly hospitalized during manic episodes told the psychologist who wanted to administer the Rorschach that she had taken it so often, she could do it with her eyes closed. Indeed she produced a long record, with responses appropriate to each card, strictly from memory, without once opening her eyes.
Even without experiences as dramatic as this, psychologists sometimes feel the need for an alternative technique. In response to a suggestion from Z. Mahmood, editor of the British Journal of Projective Psychology, an international team (Mattlar, Sandahl, Lindberg, Lehtinen, Carlsson, Vesala, & Mahmood, 1990; Ruth, Aberg, Mattlar, Sandahl, Oist, Carlsson, & Vesala, 1990; Sandahl, Mattlar, Carlsson, Vesala, & Rosenquist, 1990; Uhinki, Mattlar, Sandahl, Vesala, & Carlsson, 1990) set about “Exnerizing” the three-inkblot Zulliger so as to standardize its administration and scoring, and provide norms that would make it a viable alternative to the Rorschach. While the Zulliger’s stimulus properties and brevity are incompatible with its use as a test strictly parallel with and equivalent to the Rorschach, it could be used as an independent test that can be interpreted utilizing Rorschach principles, and yielding similar results in such areas as vocational choices, clinical diagnosis, and cross-cultural comparison.
Conclusion
We have followed the Rorschach in Finland from its adoption in the 1930’s through its baptism of fire on the Karelian front and on through a period of symbiotic dependence—normal in infancy—on the mother (the U.S.A.), the father having died too early to give much guidance. In early attempts at individuation, seeking a national identity, the child perhaps rebelled too strongly, and overemphasized its difference from the parents. Now a period of rapprochement (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 1975) has set in. Secure in its sense of independence, confident of having something of value to give, the Finnish Rorschach is also willing to acknowledge commonalities and eager to communicate and co-operate not only with parents, but with the peer group.