Experiential Foundations of Rorschach's Test

Ernest G. Schachtel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135061203
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Schachtel shared with his great contemporary David Rapaport the goal of scientifically reframing the psychoanalytic understanding of personality. Experiential Foundations of Rorschach's Test, first published in 1966, is in one sense Schachtel's extended dialogue with Rapaport (in the guise of Schachtel's interlocutor) about this ambitious task. In the course of his brilliant and lucid meditation on this topic, Schachtel attempted far more than the simple explication of particular test responses. His book contains, and should be read as, an entire theory of personality considered in terms of the ways in which one person may meaningfully and detectably differ from another.

1

Introduction

The main purpose of this book is to contribute to the understanding of Rorschach’s test. Despite the wealth of stimulating thoughts and implications contained in his book, Rorschach felt that the results of his “experiment” were predominantly empirical observations and that its theoretical foundations were, “for the most part, still quite incomplete.”¹ Of the extensive literature on the test, by far the greatest part has been devoted to adding to these empirical observations and to refinements of technique; relatively few attempts have been made to inquire into the rationale of the test and to contribute to its theoretical foundations. This is all the more surprising since Rorschach’s test and his book offer, among other things, so far as I know, the first major contribution to the problem of perception and personality, which, in the past twenty or thirty years, has become one of the foremost issues in psychology. Thus the gap between empirical observations and theoretical understanding, though somewhat narrower than in 1921, when Rorschach’s book was published, is quite large.

The attempt to increase our understanding of the foundations of the test seems important to me for several reasons. For the psychologist interested in theory, the phenomena occurring during a Rorschach test raise a wealth of questions and open up possibilities of approaching the solution of these questions because they contain data that are not accessible as readily and in such variety and abundance to other methods of observation. Any improvement of our understanding of the rationale of the test is likely to contribute to the relevant formulation of these questions and to their eventual solution. It is likely to contribute even more to the clinician’s use of the test. One can achieve some competence in the use of the test with the mere knowledge of the empirical findings that certain scores or combinations of scores tend to indicate certain types of pathology, certain tendencies, and certain assets and limitations in the personality of the testee. But such competence and such use of the test remain blind in the sense that they do not derive from an understanding of why the scores mean or indicate what they are supposed to indicate. This situation resembles a diagnosis on the basis of symptoms without understanding the nature of the connection between the symptom and the condition it usually indicates. The word “usually” is important here; without understanding the connection between symptom and the condition empirically found with it, one cannot know when what seems on the surface to be the same symptom does not indicate the same condition.

The empirical “validation” of the symptomatic significance of certain Rorschach scores does not differ in principle from some of the validation on which much folk wisdom rests, namely, on recurrent experience of a relation between two factors, a score and a trait or tendency, a dream symbol or content and its “meaning.” The main difference is that we now have statistical methods that tell us when to accept such a relationship as valid but that do not exclude the possibility that in any particular case it may not be valid. No amount of validation of Rorschach-test-score meanings can substitute for the understanding of what goes on in the test and in its interpretation.

The use of the test will be most fruitful if we understand fully the nature of the data we are studying in a Rorschach protocol and if we understand, furthermore, the nature of what we are doing when we score and interpret a protocol. This implies that we know what the processes are that lead to a response; which of these processes we single out and which we omit; what we emphasize and what we neglect when we assign a score to a response; and exactly what we do, what we assume and why we assume it, when we interpret a score or a psycho-gram, a response, a sequence of responses, or a total test protocol. We are far from knowing all this, and probably we shall never know it fully. But every step that increases our knowledge, limited though it is destined to be, will add to our understanding of the test and improve our capacity to use it intelligently. On the other hand, to use the test without the serious attempt to understand as much as possible of its rationale is tempting as well as dangerous.

It is tempting especially to the beginner, but also to the expert, insofar as it may give one a spurious feeling of security to rely on a fixed meaning of a particular score or a particular symbol (as is done in much of content interpretation) he has learned from an authority—a teacher or a book. It is more difficult if one has always to examine anew whether such meaning really applies to the concrete response before him. This does not mean, of course, that a statistically valid relation between a particular score and a particular meaning is without value. It only means that it still requires judgment to decide whether the usual meaning applies in a particular case.

If blind dependence on learned meanings of scores and the like is one danger, the development of an esoteric Rorschach language and Rorschach psychology, not or insufficiently connected and integrated with our general knowledge of the normal and abnormal psychology of personality and interpersonal relations, is another. The use of such an esoteric language and of a special Rorschach psychology entails the danger that it does not communicate meaningfully to other people, and not even to other psychologists and psychiatrists. Sometimes it does not even communicate to the person who uses it because his sense of understanding the meaning of this esoteric language is spurious even though it may be comforting and reassuring. Similarly, excessive refinements of “technique,” if not founded on advances in theory and validated by empirical data and concrete understanding, may foster a tendency to confuse the matter to be studied with the method used for the study and to mistake complicated and impressive scores and tabulations for better and more subtle understanding.²

In the following chapters, I shall attempt to develop hypotheses that I hope may contribute to a better understanding of the nature of some of the data we study in Rorschach’s test, of some of the methods by which we can study them, and thus of the rationale of the test. This attempt will include an examination of some of the reasons various scores have a particular meaning, why these meanings vary within a certain range, and what some of the limitations of the applicability of these meanings are so far as their use for diagnostic evaluation of the more enduring dynamics, trends, and traits of a particular personality is concerned. I also hope to draw the reader’s attention to some data that are omitted by the traditional scores and methods of interpretation, but that I believe can furnish significant insights into the testee’s personality structure. I call the main approach I use for the understanding of these problems “experiential” because it consists mostly in the attempt to reconstruct, to understand, and to make more explicit the experiences that the testee underwent in taking the test and his reaction to these experiences, specifically his way of approaching or avoiding and of handling the experience of the inkblots in the context of the test task. By “experience” I mean conscious as well as unconscious and only vaguely or peripherally conscious experiences.

How the testee experiences, his “apparatus for experiencing,” was also the focus of Rorschach’s interest and is of central significance in his book.³ Long before he wrote his book and throughout his life, he was interested in the differing ways in which different people see and experience a painting. When visiting an art exhibition, he would try to imagine how one or another person of his acquaintance would feel when looking at a certain painting.⁴ Though I question whether the experience type—in Rorschach’s technical sense of the word, namely, the numerical relation of movement to color responses⁵—is the main representative of the person’s way of experiencing, I do believe that the various determinants (form, color, movement, shading) represent different perceptual and experiential attitudes, as I shall try to show later, and that the relative strength of and the type of fluctuation among these attitudes are significant indicators of the person’s way of experiencing.

This way of experiencing refers primarily to the testee’s experience and perception of the inkblots, which also was the main focus of Rorschach’s interest. But the experience of the inkblots takes place in the context of a task, namely, the test task: to say what the blots might be. The posing of this task forces the testee—or at least most testees—to come to terms in some way with the inkblots, to look at them and to deal with them in accordance with the task. If they saw them outside a task situation, many would not pay any attention to them; others would deal with them in different ways; probably only relatively few would become interested in them. Hence, what the task means to the testees will have a significant influence on the quality of their encounter with the blots, on the way they experience them and deal with them. Rorschach was aware of this when he observed that some testees took the test very seriously and that for some the test is work, whereas for others it is play.⁶ The weight of the task will cause some testees to experience the blots in a much more constrained way than do others for whom the task aspect looms less forbidding and who, therefore, are freer to experience and play with the inkblots. Indeed, it is possible and occurs quite frequently that the testee’s experience of an inkblot and his reaction to the task aspect of the test are difficult for him to reconcile. If he did not have to come up with what he feels is a suitable answer to the tester s question “What might this be?”, he might either have a different experience of the inkblot or he might not feel constrained to screen out, consciously or unconsciously, some aspects of experience of the blot he may have but may cut short or reject as unsuitable for the fulfillment of the task.

Hence, in the test performance and in the responses that make up this performance, we deal not just with the testee’s encounter with and experience of the inkblots, but with this encounter in the context of the test task, that is to say, also with his experience of the test task and of what he feels he has to do in order to deal with this task. As will be shown later, some of Rorschach’s method of interpreting the test score, especially his concept of sequence, often deals with the reaction to the task aspect, even though he does not state this explicitly.

The test task is, in turn, part of the total test situation and its setting. This, too, is part of the testee’s experience, and with this, too, he deals in responding or not responding and in the particular way he responds to the inkblots. In the attempt to reconstruct the testee’s way of experiencing and his reactions to it, all these factors have to be included and kept in mind. Their totality is what I mean by the testee’s experience of the inkblots and the test. It is impossible, of course, to know and encompass all this totality by studying a test performance or its protocol. Nevertheless, most test performances give sufficient clues to enable us to reconstruct important parts of the testee’s experience and of his dealing with it and thus to see significant aspects of his personality structure. The complexity of Rorschach’s test, which will have become apparent from what has been described here, far from being an obstacle to its clinical use is indeed an asset because it allows us to observe different levels of functioning and ways of experiencing, their rigidity or flexibility, and their consistency or scatteredness.

The complexity of the test is also one of the reasons neither the experiential approach by itself nor any other approach can explain all the phenomena occurring in the test and why in interpreting tests a variety of methods is usually used, even though the interpreter may not be aware of the methodological differences between the various viewpoints from which he evaluates a response and a whole test protocol. Thus, a good W response of a high F + % ⁷ may be viewed as an achievement that permits conclusions regarding certain intellectual abilities or certain intellectual processes enabling the person to make such an achievement. Rorschach considers the W responses in this way when he uses them as an indicator of the capacities for abstraction and for imagination. But he also uses the W as an indicator of a special kind of motivation, of conscious or unconscious willing, that is to say, as pointing to dynamic factors in the personality structure. These, in turn, may be related to the way in which the testee experiences and defines the test task and the test situation. It would be an interesting task— which, to my knowledge, has not yet been undertaken—to study systematically the various implicit methodological procedures and assumptions that underly Rorschach’s and others’ ways of using and interpreting his test and thus to make these procedures and assumptions explicit.

This book attempts to do this mainly for the experiential approach which, depending on what one wants to find out from a test, has to be supplemented by other approaches. For example, in clinical use of the test, one generally will also want to get some impression of the degree and quality of the testee’s intelligence. Hence, one will also look at such factors as W, F +, and F − from the viewpoint of the level of intellectual achievement, not only from the viewpoint of the experiential meaning of W, F +, and F −. If, then, one should find, for example, one or two excellently seen F + responses while the other form responses are mostly mediocre or poor, one might conclude that the testee must have the potential for the kind of intellectual achievement represented by such an excellent F +, but that something seems to interfere with his functioning more frequently at this level. To find what it is that interferes, one might turn to an analysis of his thought processes as reflected in the test and to the experiential approach. The latter may help us to see something about the testee’s experience of his uneven performance and his reaction to it or about the lack of awareness of it. It may also help us to understand what interfered with his thought processes and why and, possibly, why this interference occurred at one point and not at another. In reality, intellectual functioning and total experience are not separated so neatly as they have been here for the sake of illustrating the difference between the experiential approach and the method of gauging intelligence from achievement, which is essentially also the method used in intelligence tests.

¹ Hermann Rorschach, Psychodiagnostics [English edition] (Berne: Hans Huber, 1942), p. 13.

² For a more detailed critique of this latter tendency in the social sciences in general, see C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), especially the chapter “Abstracted Empiricism,” pp. 50–75.

³ Rorschach, op. cit., p. 87. In the original German text, the sentence referring to the “experience type” is not only italicized, but the word Erlebnistypus is emhasized by bold type not used anywhere else in the text (4th German edition 1941], p. 82). The English translation omits both the italics and this unique emphasis.

⁴ Henri Ellenberger, “The Life and Work of Hermann Rorschach,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 18 (1954), 173–219, pp. 191, 196.

⁵ By “movement responses,” Rorschach means those interpretations of the blot that are determined by its form plus kinesthetic factors, usually people perceived as moving or in a certain posture; they will be discussed in detail in Chapter 9. By “color responses,” he means responses that are determined either solely by the color of the blot or by a combination of its color and its form; they will be discussed in Chapter 8.

⁶ Op. cit., pp. 43, 57, 81

⁷ By W (or whole) response, Rorschach means a response to the entire inkblot, as contrasted to responses referring to parts of an inkblot. By F + %, Rorschach refers to the percentage of well-seen or acceptable F, or form, responses in relation to the total number of all those responses that are determined by the form of the blot only. The form responses will be discussed in Chapter 7.

2

The Nature of the Test Data

I. The Projection Hypothesis; The Perception-Association Hypothesis

The richness as well as the complexity of the data elicited by Rorschach’s test is due to the many processes set in motion in the testee when he reacts to the task posed by the test. These processes comprise his reactions to the total test situation, including the personality and the behavior of the tester, and to the real or imagined expectations of the tester as to what the testee is to do; they comprise the testee’s thoughts and phantasies as to what conclusions the tester, and other people significant to the testee, may arrive at on the basis of his test performance, or his indifference to these conclusions; the expectations the testee has with regard to himself, his thoughts about the impression he would like to create, impulses deriving from his self-image that are mobilized by the test situation; they usually comprise both attempts to reali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword to this Edition
• Preface
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Nature of the Test Data: I. The Projection Hypothesis; the Perception-Association Hypothesis
• 3. The Nature of the Test Data: II. The Experiential Dimensions; Qualities of the Rorschach Inkblots
• 4. The Nature of the Test Data: III. Experiential Qualities of the Testee’s Reactions
• 5. The Relation of the Experiential Qualities to Some General Psychological Concepts
• 6. The Experiential Dimension and the Determinants
• 7. Form
• 8. Color
• 9. Movement
• 10. Notes on Shading
• 11. On Content, Symbol, Score, and Percept
• 12. The Interpersonal Meaning of the Rorschach-Test Situation
• Index