The inkblots : Hermann Rorschach, his iconic test, and the power of seeing / Damion Searls.
Searls, Damion, author.
2017
RC438.6.R667 S43 2017 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection

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Title The inkblots : Hermann Rorschach, his iconic test, and the power of seeing / Damion Searls.
Author Searls, Damion, author.
Edition First edition.
ISBN 9780804136549 (hardcover)
0804136548 (hardcover)
9780804136563 (paperback)
0804136564 (paperback)
Published New York : Crown, [2017]
Copyright ©2017
Language English
Description x, 405 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm
Call Number RC438.6.R667 S43 2017
Dewey Decimal Classification 616.890092 B
Summary In 1917, working alone in a remote Swiss asylum, psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach devised an experiment to probe the human mind. For years he had grappled with the theories of Freud and Jung while also absorbing the aesthetic of a new generation of modern artists. He had come to believe that who we are is less a matter of what we say, as Freud thought, than what we see. Rorschach himself was a visual artist, and his test, a set of ten carefully designed inkblots, 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, workers applying for jobs, and people suffering from mental illness -- or simply trying to understand themselves better. And it is still used today. Damion Searls draws on unpublished letters and diaries, and a cache of interviews with Rorschach's family, friends, and colleagues, to tell the story of the test's creation, its controversial reinvention, and its endurance -- and what it all reveals about the power of perception.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references (pages 327-387) and index.
Record Appears in On-Campus Resources > Books
All Resources
Introduction: Tea leaves
All becomes movement and life
Klex
I want to read people
Extraordinary discoveries and warring worlds
A path of one's own
Little inkblots full of shapes
Hermann Rorschach feels his brain being sliced apart
The darkest and most elaborate delusions
Pebbles in a riverbed
A very simple experiment
It provokes interest and head-shaking everywhere
The psychology he sees is his psychology
Right on the threshold to a better future
The inkblots come to America
Fascinating, stunning, creative, dominant
The queen of tests
Iconic as a stethoscope
The Nazi Rorschachs
A crisis of images
The system
Different people see different things
Beyond true or false
Looking ahead
The Rorschach test is not a Rorschach test
Appendix: The Rorschach family
Hermann Rorschach's character / Olga Rorschach-Shtempelin.

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