All in the mind’s eye

Everyone knows what the Rorschach tests are. Like Freudian slips, boycotts, quislings and platonic friendships, however, it was long ago forgotten that they had been named after an individual human being. Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss doctor and psychiatrist with curiosity about the visual arts, a contemporary of Freud and Jung. He created the tests in a book published in 1921, and a structure for evaluating patient responses to them before dying of appendicitis the following year.

Rorschach’s life has its interests, and certainly casts some unexpected light on the Europe of his time. His father wrote an artistic treatise which sounds extraordinarily like the Bauhaus writings of Paul Klee, decades later. Was there something circulating among Swiss artists that we don’t know about? Rorschach worked with some of the creators of psychiatric medicine, notably Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term ‘schizophrenia’, as well as having a lively interest in the theories of Freud and Jung.

The important point about Rorschach is that he was a practical clinician without the extravagant speculations that circled round both Freud and Jung. Readers of The Magic Mountain often come to the séances in the later part of the novel without realising that, for many writers on the mind, paranormal and subconscious activity might prove to be part of the same thing. Rorschach, on the other hand, had no interest in the paranormal. His concern, more promisingly, was with the links between aesthetic response and mental health, and he sought ways to comment on whether responses showed hidden neuroses or minds in good health. This, and other explorations into associations of ideas in patients, produced the famous tests.

These took on such an extraordinary life of their own that this book, inevitably, is largely about events after Rorschach’s death.