Houston Southard

Damion Searls - The Inkblots

Rorschach’s controversial inkblot test is still admissible in court custody battles, reimbursed by insurance in psychiatric clinics, and globally administered for job evaluations.

To its supporters, the 10 OG inkblots are marvelously sensitive tools for detecting a range of mental conditions, including latent problems direct observation can’t reveal.

To its critics - in and out of the psychology community, its continued use after being co-opted by the post-Pearl Harbor military in the Nuremberg trials and the jungles of Vietnam is an embarrassing vestige of pseudoscience that should’ve been written off years ago with truth serum and scream therapy, moaning the test’s power is in its ability to brainwash otherwise sensible people into believing in it.

Klex, ironically meaning inkblot, was a nickname the Brad Pitt lookalike Rorschach gained early on because klexen described someone handy with pen and ink.

Rooted in klexography, a game where psychologists had kids sign their names in ink, fold a paper in half, and interpret the mirror images to see what their soul said, was a new way to measure imagination. Alfred Binet, inspired by Da Vinci, used this to test memory and pattern recognition.

Rorschach was always fond of visual imagery, having to overcome his optical memory to compensate for his musical auditory dyslexia. Inspired by Freud and Jung, as a psychiatrist, Rorschach instead used his revised test to measure perception as the concept of empathy arose as a relay between internalizing the world with the projected self.

Searls draws on letters, diaries, and interviews with Rorschach’s family, friends, and colleagues to tell the story of the test’s creation, its reinvention, and what its endurance reveals about the power of present perception.

“Seeing happens in the mind. A visual task that calls upon enough of our perceptual powers will reveal the mind at work.”