ANTITUSSIVE

By Drake Bennett, Globe Staff September 12, 2004 HERMANN RORSCHACH didn't invent the inkblot. In the new book "The Cult of Personality," Annie Murphy Paul notes that "inkblots -- accidental forms created by folding a piece of paper on which drops of ink have been placed -- had occupied an odd corner of European culture for almost a hundred years," a favored prop for fortune-tellers and entertainers. Perhaps because of this, the Swiss psychiatrist's test -- designed to reveal personality and diagnose mental illness based on a subject's reaction to a series of inkblots -- had a hard time making it to press. When it was finally published in 1921 (with the number of cards reduced to 10 from the original 15 in order to cut costs and the blots themselves blurred by printing errors), it was either ignored or dismissed by most psychologists. It found a haven in the United States, though, which had already proven so welcoming to the theories of Freud and Jung. Warring schools of Rorschach interpretation sprung up, each with its own charismatic leader. Paul quotes one enthusiast on the "feverish activity, unbridled enthusiasm and optimism" of the American Rorschachers in the 1930s. Another exulted that a "foolproof X-ray of a personality" had been found. One of the more remarkable documents of Rorschach analysis is "22 Cells in Nuremberg," an account by the psychiatrist Douglas Kelley of his administration of the test to the Nazi leaders awaiting trial at Nuremberg in 1946. Looking at one blot, Rudolf Hess saw "two men talking about a crime, blood is on their minds." Robert Ley, formerly head of the German Labor Front, saw a bear. "You can see the head and teeth with terrific legs," he said. "It has shadows and peculiar arms. It is alive and represents Bolshevism overrunning Europe." Since its conception, the test has been battered by charges of mysticism and pseudoscience. But its status as a cultural touchstone was ensured in 1984 when Andy Warhol did his famous series of Rorschach paintings. It was a perfect match for an artist who himself had always cultivated a sort of beguiling blankness. He claimed that he had originally meant to test himself with his paintings, then thought it might be more interesting "to hire somebody to read into them, to pretend that it was me." He never got around to doing either.

# posted by Resty Odon @ 9:26 AM