Thoughts on Hermann Rorschach

I find it hilarious that one day in a frenzied state of wanting to shed everything related to college from my life, as I’m throwing away notebooks and materials used throughout my college career, I could not bring myself to toss my academic papers. They are something I had spent so much time, energy and sweat on. I had sacrificed social events, sleep, food and even a healthy mental state to hand in these lengthy, analytical papers. So how could I bring myself to throw them away?

Instead, I looked for a place where I could upload them digitally online. That’s when I came across Academia.edu, this wonderful little resource where people can post scholarly papers and articles to be shared publicly via the world wide web. And that’s just what it has done. This was three years ago. Since then I have had online visitors reading my various papers from all over the world. These nine papers have received a over 29,000 document views! That’s probably more traffic than my blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest accounts combined!

So, in being that today is Hermann Rorschach’s 129th birthday, I thought I would post up my paper written on his use of inkblot tests as a psychological assessment for his patients. (I’ve had over 4,000 views, and already received 910 views of this paper so far today, so people must be interested in learning more!) nov8thanalytics

Hermann-Rorschach The Rorschach inkblot personality test was developed in the early 1920s by Hermann Rorschach. The test was derived from the children’s game of Blotto, also known as Klecksographie, which used word and story associations from ink images blotted onto cards (Framingham, 2011, p.1). Once Rorschach took an interest in hallucinations
and schizophrenic patients, their responses to the game intrigued Rorschach to study the blots further. Using a set of cards containing black-and-white or colored blots of ink, the patient is asked to describe animage they see in the blot. Their responses are then scored according to a coding system which Rorschach developed. This system “reveal[ed] modes of perception and their relation to personality and psychopathology”, according to Marguerite Hertz who devoted much of her study to the Rorschach method (Hertz, 1992, p. 168).  Although Hermann Rorschach did not consider this personality assessment as a projective method in his 1921 publication Psychodiagnostik, later followers of this test considered it so. They see it as a significant test because “its scores may tap more unconscious or implicit processes relevant to psychopathy(e.g., self-concept, unconscious drives)” (Wood, Lilienfeld, Nezworski, Garb, Allen &Wildermuth, 2010, p. 336)…To read more on Hermann Rorschach and his inkblot tests, click THIS LINK.

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Click THIS LINK to view my other papers on Sustainable Development in Brazil, Gender Equality in Christianity, how drugs & religion affect the brain, my life in the Fiji Islands…and much more!

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