The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing - Hardcover

Searls, Damion

 
9780804136549: The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0804136548 ISBN 13: 9780804136549
Verlag: Random House LCC US, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

An NPR Best Book of the Year
A New York Post Best Book of the Year
A Times Thought Book of the Year
An Irish Independent Best Book of the Year

The captivating, untold story of Hermann Rorschach and his famous inkblot test

In 1917, working alone in a remote Swiss asylum, psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach devised an experiment to probe the human mind: a set of ten carefully designed inkblots. For years he had grappled with the theories of Freud and Jung while also absorbing the aesthetic movements of the day, from Futurism to Dadaism. A visual artist himself, Rorschach had come to believe that who we are is less a matter of what we say, as Freud thought, than what we see.

After Rorschach's early death, his test quickly made its way to America, where it took on a life of its own. Co-opted by the military after Pearl Harbor, it was a fixture at the Nuremberg trials and in the jungles of Vietnam. It became an advertising staple, a cliché in Hollywood and journalism, and an inspiration to everyone from Andy Warhol to Jay Z. The test was also given to millions of defendants, job applicants, parents in custody battles, and people suffering from mental illness or simply trying to understand themselves better. And it is still used today.

In this first-ever biography of Rorschach, Damion Searls draws on unpublished letters and diaries and a cache of previously unknown interviews with Rorschach's family, friends, and colleagues to tell the unlikely story of the test's creation, its controversial reinvention, and its remarkable endurance-and what it all reveals about the power of perception. Elegant and original, The Inkblots shines a light on the twentieth century's most visionary synthesis of art and science.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Damion Searls has written for Harper’s, n+1, and The Paris Review, and has translated the work of authors including Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, and five Nobel Prize winners. He has been the recipient of Guggenheim, NEA, and Cullman Center fellowships.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

All Becomes Movement and Life

One late December morning in 1910, Hermann Rorschach, twenty-six years old, woke up early. He walked across the cold room and pushed the bedroom curtain aside, letting in the pale white light that comes before a late northern sunrise-not enough to wake his wife, just enough to reveal her face and the thick black hair spilling out from under their comforter. It had snowed in the night, as he'd thought it would. Lake Constance had been gray for weeks; the water's blue was months away, but the world was beautiful like this, too, with no one in sight along the shore or on the little path in front of their tidy two-room apartment. The scene was not just empty of human movement but drained of color, like a penny postcard, a landscape in black and white.

He lit his first cigarette of the morning, boiled some coffee, dressed, and left quietly as Olga slept. It was a busier week than usual at the clinic, with Christmas around the corner. There were only three doctors to look after four hundred patients, so he and the others were responsible for everything: staff meetings, visiting the patients on twice-daily rounds, organizing special events. Still, Rorschach let himself enjoy the morning's solitary walk through the clinic grounds. The notebook he always carried with him stayed in his pocket. It was cold, though nothing compared to the Christmas he'd spent in Moscow four years earlier.

Rorschach was especially looking forward to the holiday this year: he and Olga were reunited, they would be sharing a tree as husband and wife for the first time. The clinic celebration would be on the twenty-third; on the twenty-fourth, the doctors would carry a small tree lit with candles from one building to another, for the patients who couldn't join in the communal ceremony. On the twenty-fifth the Rorschachs would be free to go back to his childhood home and pay a visit to his stepmother. This he tried to put out of his mind.

Christmas season at the asylum meant group singing three times a week, and dance classes run by a male nurse who played a guitar, a harmonica, and a triangle with his foot, all at the same time. Rorschach didn't like to dance, but for Olga's sake he forced himself to take lessons. One Christmastime duty he truly enjoyed was directing the holiday plays. They were staging three this year, including one with projected images-photographs of landscapes and people from the clinic. What a surprise it would be for the patients to suddenly see faces they knew on the screen, larger than life.

Many of the patients were too far gone to thank their relatives for Christmas presents, so Rorschach wrote little notes on their behalf, sometimes fifteen a day. On the whole, though, his patients liked the holidays as much as their troubled souls allowed. Rorschach's adviser used to tell the story of a patient so dangerous and unruly she had been kept in a cell for years. Her hostility was understandable in the restrictive, coercive clinical environment, but when she was taken to a Christmas celebration she behaved perfectly, reciting the poems she had memorized especially for January 2, Berchtold Day. Two weeks later she was released.

He tried to apply his teacher's lessons here. He took photos of his patients, not only for his own sake and for the patient files, but because they liked posing for the camera. He gave them art supplies: pencil and paper, papier-mâché, modeling clay.

As Rorschach's feet crunched the snow on the clinic's grounds, his thoughts on new ways to give his patients something to enjoy, he would naturally have mused on the holidays of his own childhood and the games he had played then: sled races, Capture the Castle, Hare and Hounds, Hide and Seek, and the game where you spill some ink on a sheet of paper, fold it in half, and see what it looks like.

Hermann Rorschach was born in November of 1884, a light-bringing year. The Statue o

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Verlag
Random House LCC US
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804136548
ISBN 13 
9780804136549
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
414
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
MUSIC STORE professional GmbH
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