Let’s imagine we met someone at a party a few days back. Of these ambiguous situations, none is more painful, more intensely scrutinised or more telling of the state of our own self-worth, than what we can call the missing phone call. Or someone has asked to see us, but we don’t yet have a reason. For example: someone is late, but we don’t know why. The facts are unknown – and could point in a whole host of directions. Many situations we encounter in life have something important in common with Rorschach inkblot tests: we don’t quite know what they mean. The image isn’t in itself of anything, but what we end up saying that it ‘is’ or that it ‘means’ is really a story about us – not an account of what is going on in the real world. Another, more traumatised by a domineering father, might see it as a powerful figure viewed from below, with splayed feet, thick legs, heavy shoulders and the head bent forward as if poised for attack. So, to one individual with a warm childhood and a rather kindly and forgiving conscience, the image below could be seen as a sweet mask, with eyes, floppy ears, a covering for the mouth and wide flaps extending from the cheeks. Any Rorschach inkblot image will have no one true meaning, but different people will see different things in it according to what their past and underlying mentality predisposes them to imagine. The test would be a guide to how patients really felt about themselves and the world. The interpretations they can give rise to are almost infinite – which was precisely the point in Rorschach’s eyes.īy being shown an ambiguous image and asked to say what came to mind, Rorschach believed that we would naturally reveal some of our latent guiding fears, hopes, prejudices and assumptions. These shapes don’t actually represent anything, they are inherently ambiguous, but they are suggestive of a number of things in the outside world: one shape might look a bit like a bird, another might resemble a fish or a cloud. Rorschach found that ink randomly poured onto pieces of paper that are then folded ends up leaving an array of distinctive shapes behind. In the 1930s, the Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach was seeking to understand more about the contents in the unconscious minds of his patients – when he hit upon the notion of asking them to respond to the legendary inkblot test that still bears his name.
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