Inkblot

Despite decades of controversy, the Rorschach test is still widely used and continues to pervade popular culture. Shouldn't we have written off this rather embarrassing vestige of early twentieth-century pseudoscience long ago, along with hypnosis, orgone boxes, and truth serum? In fact, the Rorschach test remains because it works-much better than Rorschach himself ever imagined. How and why that's the case cuts to the very heart of human personality.

In The Inkblot Experiment, author Damion Searls explores this phenomenon. He tells the story of Hermann Rorschach, his ingenious experiment, and his pioneering insight into personality before going on to discuss the long and unexpected afterlife the Rorschach test has enjoyed in the last century. Searls pays tribute to this man's fascinating and too brief life but also considers the cultural history of his famous test, how it evolved and grew out of a period of intense ferment in psychology and psychoanalysis (Freud was a near contemporary, Jung a colleague) and how both the cultural and the clinical meaning and uses of the test have changed over time.This is a story that begins in a snow-covered asylum in Switzerland and brings us, a hundred years later, to the crossroads of mental illness, healthcare, science, law, and art.