If there's way to understand how a man perceives things, it is through the Rorschach test. The new Mammootty starrer film Rorschach directed by Nisham Basheer had left people curious about this word and lately this test itself has become a matter of curiosity.
The Rorschach test is less about the specific things that we see around and is more about our general approach to perception. Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist, invented this test in the early 20th century. He was fascinated by how visual perception varies from person to person. He decided to pursue this interest and tried to have an expanded learning about it during his education in the medical school. There he learned that all our senses are deeply interconnected. Rorschach studied how the process of human perception doesn’t register sensory inputs, but just transforms them. This gave him the idea to develop something visually to understand the intricacies of the mind.
When he started working at a mental hospital in eastern Switzerland, Rorschach began designing a series of puzzling images to gain a new insight into this enigmatic process. He developed inkblot paintings and used them to quiz on hundreds of healthy people and psychiatric patients to know what they might have possibly retrieved from these paintings. Rorschach focused on how people approached the test to understand their clear perception.
With further study on these participants, Rorschach was able to narrow down a wide range of interpretations to specific numbers which helped him to categorise the human mind—the creative and the imaginative, the detail oriented, the big-picture perceivers and flexible participants able to adapt to their approach.
After multiple tests, when the healthy people started showing a similar pattern and mentally ill persons followed a different pattern, it started becoming a reliable diagnostic tool in psychology. This helped in solving psychological issues which couldn’t be done otherwise.
The coding system of the test, along with ten inkblots which he thought gave the most nuanced picture of people’s perception, was published in 1921. Over the next few decades, this test became wildly popular around the world. By the 1960s, it had been officially administered millions of times in the US alone.
After the death of Rorschach, his tests were left halfway without keeping its data on track. However, some specialists used it for different speculative purposes. For instance, researchers used the test to understand the psychological roots of mass murder in a Nazi war criminal’s mind.
The reputation of this test started declining among the medical professionals even as it started entering the pop culture.
Rorschach test is still controversial for its unique way of analysing the complex human mind and many people claim the test has been disproven. But a 2013 review of all the existing Rorschach researches showed that when administered properly the test yields valid results, which can help diagnose mental illness or round out a patient’s psychological profile.
Human mind is a very fascinating space with varied interpretations. But this test helps in retrieving different perceptions of people and helps psychologists paint a more nuanced picture of how people see the world. This indeed opens the possibility of understanding mankind more closely.
