BOOK REVIEW: “The Inkblots” is a dual biography drowned in excessive context …

In my more than 30 years as a clinical therapist, I’ve never used inkblots as a personality test. Like most people, I was familiar with the blotted images, but honestly, have never been able to grasp how they could be used as a reliable, scientific, psychological measure of anyone.

I could imagine it might be intriguing to use the test with clients, but reliable or effective?

I couldn’t imagine it.

But many disagree.

Thus, my curiosity led me to review Damion Searls’ new book — a “dual biography” — titled, “The Inkblots,” and sub-titled, “Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing” (published by Crown Publishers).

Going into my review reading, I didn’t know anything about Hermann Rorshach, either as the man or the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst other than he was a contemporary to the likes of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. I also didn’t know anything about the famous inkblot test, although I had seen the inkblots and knew the test is still being used today.

After reading the book, I still don’t know much about Rorschach, although I have improved understanding of the inkblot test, but with gaping unresolved questions.

That’s because I found this “dual biography” to be drowned in excessive context by the author.

The first half of the book is an attempted biography of Rorschach, the man and psychiatrist. Being a Swiss psychiatrist and slowly generating some prominence during the era of peers such as Freud and Jung, you would think there might be a fascinating story about who the man behind the inkblots really was. Had he not died an early, and what seems to be a senseless death, Rorschach may have gone on to such prominence that would have rivaled or surpassed his peers, but his life was cut short just as he was finally beginning to establish some notoriety and credibility with his peculiar personality test.

The problem with the first half of the book is the story of Hermann Rorschach is lost in a sea of context. The reader seems to learn more about “the times” than about Rorschach deeply as a person, or even as a psychiatrist, although the author is a little more insightful about the man as psychoanalyst than as a person. It’s important for a writer to provide context to understand the times, culture, environment, etc., in which a person lived. But so much detail is given that the minutia of context leaves little exposure of the man himself. By the time I completed the book, I didn’t know Hermann Rorschach very well — not a good outcome for a biography.

The second half of the book picked up pace as a “biography” of the inkblot test itself, almost as if the author had less skill in writing about a person’s life as he does conveying the story of something inanimate. This is where I found the book to be more interesting, but more as an educational experience as I learned of the origin, intended purpose, and eventual popularity of the Rorschach inkblot test. While making a pitch to a publisher, Rorschach characterized his test as follows when he described his book:

“It concerns a very simple experiment, which – not to mention for the moment its theoretical ramifications – has a very wide range of applications. It permits not only the individual diagnosis of psychological illness profiles but also a differential diagnosis: whether someone is neurotic or psychotic or healthy. With healthy individuals, it gives very far-reaching information about the person’s character and personality; with the mentally ill, the results let us see their former character, which is mostly still there behind a psychosis.”

Rorschach wouldn’t live to see the psychiatric world embrace his test, with the inkblots becoming the most used personality test for an extended period of time, reaching its heyday in the 1960’s with at least one million people tested each year, to an eventual decline in using the test that would become so precipitous it is no longer among the leading tools for psychiatrists and psychologists today. One current psychologist active in the assessment field today says the Rorschach test “… is sort of like vinyl: you only use it if you really want the music to be good.”

Even in this second half of the book, the author is still given to a tendency to drown the reader in more context than is necessary. If you’re curious about Rorschach the Swiss psychiatrist, “The Inkblots” is probably your best resource for gaining a little insight about the person, and you can definitely gain an understanding of the origin, rise and fall of the iconic inkblots, but you’ll have to be willing to wade through a lot of minutia to get either.

Scotty

I received this book free from the publisher in exchange for this review. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”