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CHAPTER 3
FROM CULT TO ICON: THE RORSCHACH COMES TO AMERICA
“The Rorschach method does not reveal a behavior picture, but rather shows –
like an X-ray picture – the underlying structure which makes behavior
understandable.” Bruno Klopfer, 1940
The American Pioneers: Beck, Hertz, and Klopfer
Word Spreads: Samuel Beck and Margarita Hertz:
Because Hermann Rorschach’s Psychodiagnostics was unavailable in English during the
1920s and 1930s (a translation wouldn’t appear until 1942), information about his test
first spread among American psychologists through word of mouth. Emil Oberholzer,1 a
Swiss colleague of Rorschach who’d kept his friend’s ideas alive, taught the test to David
Levy, an American psychiatrist. Levy 2 taught it to Samuel Beck, a graduate student in
psychology at Columbia University in New York City. Beck in turn passed it on to
Marguerite Hertz, another graduate student at Western Reserve University,3 whom he’d
met during the 1920s while he was working as a reporter in Cleveland.
In 1932, ten years after Hermann Rorschach’s death, Samuel Beck at Columbia
completed the first Ph.D. dissertation in the United States on the Rorschach Inkblot Test.
In the same year his friend Marguerite Hertz at Western Reserve wrote the second. Both
Beck and Hertz were destined to devote the next 50 years of their lives to the Rorschach,
spreading the word among clinical psychologists and becoming legends in their
profession. As Margarita Hertz said toward the end of her life, “I have been happily
wedded to the Rorschach.”4
Beck was a gentle, earnest scholar with a special devotion to three heroes: Hermann
Rorschach, Sigmund Freud, and the neurologist Walter Hughlings Jackson. Hertz came
to be known for her outspoken, sometimes blunt opinions and her devotion to scientific
rigor, overcoming discrimination against her as a woman and Jew (letters from her
university addressed her as “Mrs. David R. Hertz,” and one of its officials remarked that
Jewish faculty should teach in Jewish institutions).5
Both Beck and Hertz were diligent researchers, well trained in the psychological theories
and techniques of their time. After receiving their doctorates they immediately threw
themselves into gathering more data on the test. By the end of 1935 Beck had published
an astounding 11 articles on the Rorschach, including several in highly prominent
journals.6 In the same years Hertz began to publish her findings on children and
adolescents. Thanks to the efforts of these two enthusiastic young scientists, American
psychologists in the mid-1930s finally began to learn about the Rorschach test other than
through rumor and personal contacts.
An Organizer is Found: Bruno Klopfer
As the articles of Beck and Hertz were published, interest in the Rorschach started to
grow. Unfortunately, there were no books available to teach the test (unless you read
German), and only a handful of psychologists knew it well enough to serve as instructors.
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At Columbia University in 1934 a group of psychology graduate students tried to find a
Rorschach teacher. Samuel Beck had moved away to Boston two years previously, but
the students discovered that Bruno Klopfer, a research assistant in the Anthropology
Department, knew how to administer and score the test. Though Klopfer himself had no
great interest in the Rorschach, he agreed to meet with the students one night each week
and teach them for a small fee.
Klopfer was a Berlin psychologist who’d left his country in 1933 to escape the rising
power of the Nazis. Attracted by the theories of C. G. Jung, the famous Swiss
psychiatrist whose work had also influenced Hermann Rorschach, Klopfer moved to
Zurich where he entered training under Jung and worked in a position that Jung had
arranged for him. Considering Klopfer’s education and extensive experience, his Zurich
job of administering and scoring psychological tests was humdrum and low-level.
Although he learned to use the Rorschach while in Switzerland (the test had become
fairly popular in the country of its birth), he was not particularly impressed with it.
Less than a year after moving to Zurich, Klopfer managed to obtain a position as research
assistant in the Anthropology Department at Columbia University in New York. Again,
the job was not really a good fit with his interests and experience. However, the Great
Depression was underway and Klopfer had a family to support. In all likelihood, he
accepted the job at Columbia with the idea that he could eventually find work in America
that was more suitable.
When Klopfer began to meet with the graduate students from Columbia each week at his
apartment, at first he intended to take a nuts-and-bolts approach, teaching them the basics
of administering and scoring the Rorschach. However, the students soon complicated his
task by pointing out that when they tried to score responses to the test, they often ran into
problems that were difficult to resolve. For example, suppose a patient reported that one
of the blots looked like “a man lying in a coffin.” Should this response be scored as M
(Human Movement)? On the one hand, the word “lying” seemed to convey “passive
movement,” which would be scored as M. On the other hand, the idea of a moving
corpse seemed illogical.
Other disagreements centered on the scoring of movement for animals or inanimate
objects. If M responses were supposed to reflect a patient’s tendency to perceive
movement where none was actually present, the graduate students asked, why shouldn’t
responses like “a fish diving through the water” or “a rock smashing against a house”
also be scored as M? Why was M restricted to images of humans only?
Klopfer had to agree that such questions weren’t really resolved in Hermann Rorschach’s
book. After all, Rorschach had intended Psychometrics as a research report, not a
detailed instruction manual. Furthermore, a lecture given by Rorschach toward the end
of his life and published posthumously in Switzerland in the early 1930s7 showed that
he’d continued to tinker with the test after its publication, adding new scoring categories
that were only vaguely defined.8 When Klopfer met with the graduate students,
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disagreements abounded regarding both the scoring of these new categories and their
psychological meaning.
The classes at Klopfer’s apartment quickly evolved into lively meetings where the
scoring and interpretation of the Rorschach test were debated and discussed, sometimes
into the small hours of the morning. When additional graduate students from Columbia
and New York University signed up, Klopfer added a second class, then a third. Based
on his discussions with the students, he began to develop a large number of new scoring
categories.
By 1936 Klopfer had become the informal leader of a closely knit group of Rorschach
enthusiasts. In that year he began to publish a mimeographed newsletter called the
Rorschach Research Exchange, and in 1939 he formally established the Rorschach
Institute, an organization of psychologists, social workers, and other professionals
devoted to the test. Both the newsletter and the Institute thrived and eventually evolved
into the present-day Journal of Personality Assessment and Society for Personality
Assessment, which still retain their original purpose of studying and promoting the
Rorschach.
A magnetic speaker with an unusual capacity for establishing an empathetic connection
with the people he met, Bruno Klopfer possessed exceptional talents as an organizer and
proselytizer. Were it not for his organizational talents, the Rorschach Inkblot Test
probably never would have become as popular, or as controversial, as it eventually did.
In the next sections, we’ll take a deeper look at why the test exerted such a strong appeal
for some psychologists in the 1930s, and why it aroused equally strong skepticism among
others.
The Appeal of the Rorschach
The Young Profession of Clinical Psychology.
At the time that the Rorschach first appeared in America, clinical psychology was still a
tiny, embryonic profession, viewed askance by medical doctors and many psychologists
who worked in universities.9 In the 1930s there were no graduate programs in clinical
psychology. Any student who wished to become a clinical psychologist had to enroll in a
general doctoral program in psychology and then supplement the regular coursework
with classes and internships that would provide preparation for clinical work.
The first clinical psychology clinic in the United States had been established at the
University of Pennsylvania in1896. It focused on children with learning problems, and
for the next 40 years clinical psychology was mainly a child-oriented profession, working
with the mentally retarded, juvenile delinquents, and students with educational
difficulties. When the first effective IQ tests were introduced into the United States by
the psychologist Henry H. Goddard around 1910 (a story I’ll tell in more detail later in
this chapter), the profession gained an important new tool that enhanced its prestige. As
clinical psychologists began to use IQ tests to identify mentally retarded children,
however, they often encountered fierce resistance from physicians, who took the position
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that only medical doctors should diagnose mental retardation, and that psychologists who
did so were practicing medicine without a license.
Many psychologists who worked in universities also opposed the development of clinical
psychology as a profession. These academic psychologists thought that the scientific
base of psychology was still in its infancy (they were certainly correct), and that the time
was too early to set up clinics and a separate profession of clinical psychology. They
tended to believe that psychologists should devote themselves exclusively to research,
and that the application of psychological discoveries to clinical work should wait until the
science was more fully developed. So strong were the feelings on this issue that for
many years the American Psychological Association was reluctant to admit clinical
psychologists as members unless they were also active researchers who had published in
scientific journals (?? check facts).
Dissatisfaction With Self-Report Personality Tests
During the 1920s and 1930s, clinical psychologists commonly worked with psychiatrists
and social workers in child guidance clinics and centers for the treatment of juvenile
delinquents. At first the psychologists’ main role was to administer IQ tests. However
they soon began using personality tests as well, hoping to shed light on the emotional
problems and motives of the children they were trying to help.
The clinical psychologists faced an enormous practical difficulty, though, because the
personality tests available in that era weren’t particularly helpful. Psychologists
generally agreed about the definition of “intelligence” and how to measure it. In contrast,
“personality” was considered a much vaguer concept, and there was no consensus about
what it was or how it should be measured. College psychology departments usually
didn’t even offer courses on personality in the 1920s and early 1930s.10
Most personality tests of the time were self-report inventories that asked a series of
yes/no questions related to a single trait, such as sociability (“I like to relax by spending
time with my friends”) or anxiety (“I tend to be a worrier”). In clinical settings, such
inventories were viewed as less than satisfactory for several reasons.11 First, they relied
on patients to accurately and honestly report their own behaviors, attitudes, and thoughts.
But what about patients who were unwilling or unable to provide such information?
Many people, whether patients or non-patients, are reluctant to discuss sensitive topics
such as personal problems, sexual activities, or alcohol use. As one critic of self-report
tests commented, the most important things about an individual are often what he cannot
or will not say.12
The second problem with the self-report inventories of the 1920s and 1930s was their
narrow focus. Typically they measured only a single trait or a few. Obviously clinical
psychologists needed something more than the bare information that the child they were
evaluating was “introverted” or “anxious.” The third problem with the inventories was
their lack of depth: At most they described how a particular patient behaved, but without
providing insight about why he or she acted that way.13
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In the 1930s, many clinical psychologists wanted a personality test that did not depend on
a patient’s own potentially unreliable self-descriptions, and that provided a full and
complex picture of him or her as an individual. The Rorschach, particularly as it was reshaped by Bruno Klopfer, seemed to fit this need precisely. Whereas self-report
inventories depended on what a patient was willing or able to reveal about himself or
herself, Klopfer claimed that the Rorschach could operate like an x-ray14 and penetrate
deep within the individual without his or her awareness. As an article in Klopfer’s
Rorschach Research Exchange asserted, “It is just because the subject is not aware of
what he is telling and has no cultural norms for hiding himself that the Rorschach and
other projective methods are so revealing.”15
In addition, whereas most self-report inventories yielded scores for only one or two
personality traits, Klopfer’s elaborate scoring system for the Rorschach yielded more than
fifty.16 Poring over this wealth of data, a psychologist could weave together the various
scores in the intuitive manner suggested by Klopfer, and produce a rich and nuanced
portrait of a patient’s personality.
Of course, “rich and nuanced” was not necessarily the same as “accurate,” and therein lay
the seeds of a bitter dispute that soon arose among psychologists, eventually dividing two
of the original Rorschach “pioneers,” Bruno Klopfer and Samuel Beck. At the same time
that some psychologists in the 1930s were embracing the Rorschach as an amazingly
sensitive psychological instrument, others began to express misgivings about the test and
its enthusiastic promoters. To understand this resistance to the Rorschach, we need to
realize that American psychologists had heard something similar once before. In the next
section we’ll go back to the 1910s and 1920s, when IQ tests were first adopted in the U.
S. with the same kind of enthusiasm that surrounded the Rorschach test in the 1930s. The
hard and sobering lessons that American psychologists had learned from their
misadventures with intelligence tests had prepared them to be cautious about the claims
of Rorschach promoters.
The Ups and Downs of Intelligence Testing: 1905 to 1930
Alfred Binet and the First Modern Intelligence Test
The modern intelligence test originated in France nearly 100 years ago. The
establishment of free public education in Europe and America during the 1800s had
vastly increased the number and diversity of children in schools. In France as elsewhere,
recognition grew that some “feebleminded” children (we would now say “mentally
retarded” or “developmentally delayed”) could not learn as quickly as others and needed
what is now called “special education.”
Unfortunately, in the 1800s and early 1900s there was no good procedure for picking out
the children with lower mental ability who needed special education. Teachers were
often asked to identify the children in their classes whom they considered feebleminded.
However (as I noted in the last chapter during my discussion of Hermann Rorschach’s
research) informal estimates of intelligence tend to be poor. For example, a survey of
Paris teachers revealed that they used widely different methods for estimating children’s
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intellectual abilities. Many teachers mistakenly believed that a child’s facial expression
or head shape was useful for estimating intelligence.17
Several American and European psychologists in the late 1800s had attempted to develop
“mental tests” by measuring sensory and physical characteristics, such as muscular
strength, reaction time, and sharpness of vision.18 In the 1890s, however, the French
psychologist Alfred Binet began to experiment with a much different approach, asking
children to perform tasks that required judgment, comprehension, and reasoning.19 For
instance, a child might be asked to put together a simple puzzle, or to guess the word that
had been left out of an incomplete sentence. Over a period of 15 years, working with
hundreds of school children, Binet and his colleagues developed the first modern
intelligence test, which was published in 1905 with revisions in 1908 and 1911. Like
Rorschach, Binet died shortly after his test was developed and did not live to see how
successful it would become.20
Henry Goddard and the Menace of Feeblemindedness
Binet’s intelligence test was soon translated into English and published in the U. S. by
Henry H. Goddard,21 a psychologist at the little-known Training School for FeebleMinded Girls and Boys in Vineland, New Jersey.22 At first, Goddard used the test to
identify children who needed special education, classifying them according to their
degree of intellectual deficiency: The most severely retarded children he classified as
“idiots,” the moderately retarded as “imbeciles,” and the mildly retarded as “morons” (a
term of Goddard’s own invention). His focus on retarded children was natural, since
most clinical psychologists of that era worked with children who had educational
problems. He soon achieved national recognition within his profession, publishing the
highly regarded book Feeblemindedness. The Training School at Vineland began to offer
summer courses for teachers, who learned to administer Binet’s intelligence test and
imitate the School’s progressive educational practices.
If Goddard’s had limited his work to developmentally delayed children, he would
probably be regarded today as a benevolent figure and the most eminent American
clinical psychologist of his time. Instead he is remembered as a wrong-headed idealist
who embroiled the new field of intelligence testing in a disastrous controversy that has
continued sporadically until the present day.23
Goddard taught that “feeblemindedness” was a hereditary condition responsible for
myriad social ills, including crime, alcoholism, and prostitution. He warned that feebleminded people constituted a threat to the very moral fabric of America: “The feebleminded person is a menace to society at the present moment.”24 In his widely read book,
The Kallikak Family, Goddard traced the history of two families, each of them descended
from the same Revolutionary War soldier. On the one hand, the soldier had entered into
an illicit liason with a “feeble-minded” barmaid. The offspring of this union down
through later generations were characterized by drunkenness, crime, poverty, and
madness. On the other hand, the soldier had married an upstanding Colonial woman of
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good family. The descendants of this marriage were people of singular eminence and
virtue, including government leaders, army officers, doctors, and ministers.25
Goddard’s history of the Kallikak family’s two branches was seriously flawed and
biased. However, when first published in 1913, it had an enormous impact.
Eugenics
See also “By controlling the feebleminded, Goddard argued, the state would
simultaneously reduce crime, poverty, prostitution, alcoholism, illegitimacy, and
numerous other social ills.” p. 232
Set up summer classes
spirit of teachers
tested immigrants on Ellis Islandb
Several of Rorschach’s Swiss colleagues continued to work on the test after his death, including
Oberholzer, Walter Morganthaler, Hans Behn-Eschenburg and Georg Roemer. In the 1930s, Hans Binder
?? also became prominent. Although all four of these men made important contributions to the
development of the Rorschach test, I confess (with apologies to my European colleagues), that I will not be
discussing their work in depth. My focus is on the way that the Rorschach developed in the U. S.
2
Although prominent in the 1930s and 1940s, Levy is now seldom mentioned except for his relationship
with Samuel Beck. Most books identify Levy as a psychiatrist. However, Margarita Hertz, who knew him
personally, states that he was both a psychiatrist and a psychologist (Hertz, 1986, p.398).
3
Case Western Reserve (???) University.
4
Hertz (1986, p. 398)
5
Kessler (1994).
6
For a list of publications, see “Samuel Jacob Beck -- Citation” (1965) in Journal of Projective Techniques
and Personality Assessment, 29, 414-417.
7
This lecture appears at the back of all English editions of Psychodiagnostics under the title “The
Application of the Form Interpretation Test.” It also appears at the back of the second and all later German
editions of the book (see remarks made in Walter Morganthaler’s “Preface to the Second Edition” of
Psychodiagnostics (Rorschach,1921/1964, pp. 11-12).
8
Rorschach called these new variables “Chiaroscuro.” Today they would be classifed as Vista, Diffuse
Shading, and perhaps Texture and Achromatic Color.
9
Excellent book-length histories of clinical psychology have been written by Reisman (1976) and Routh
(1994). A briefer treatment is provided in a chapter by Hilgard (1987, pp. 615-661).
10
Hilgard, 1987, pp. 493-494
11
For negative comments on the self-report tests of that era, see Frank, 1939b, 1948; Hertz, 1986, p. 397.
12
Henry Murray, as paraphrased by Frank, 1939b, p. 395.
13
Hertz, 1986.
14
Klopfer (1940)
15
Frank (1939a, p. 104)
16
Klopfer & Kelley (1946)
17
Goodenough (1949, pp. 34-37)
18
Anastasi (1988, pp. 8-10)
19
Anastasi (1988, pp. 10-11)
20
Anastasi (1988, p. 11)
21
Goddard (1908, 1910); see also Hilgard (1987, pp. 463-466)
22
Although now well-known to many psychologists, the Vineland Training School was “obscure” before
Henry Goddard established its reputation (Zenderland, 1998, p.2)
23
cite Gould, The Mismeasure of Man. I might want to take a look at that book and give a quote from
Gould in the footnote.
24
Zenderland (1998, p. 232)
25
Add note, probably from Zenderland, also Goddard, regarding the Kallikak book.
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