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THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO the first of Ernest Schachtel's articles on the Rorschach appeared in Psychiatry. It is almost 20 years since Metamorphosis(1959) was first published and 10 since his Experiential Foundations of Rorschach's Test(1966) brought the successive articles on Rorschach together. This paper is less a reappraisal of the meaning and worth of these writings than an account of the continuous use I have made of them as a teacher of graduate students. I have worked with graduate students in psychology, particularly in diagnostic practicums and also have been teaching child development in teacher education graduate school.
It is a somewhat different world today from when we first read the article on "Dynamic Perception and the Symbolism of Form." It is worthwhile to look at what the student today brings to his reading and what may make him responsive. It is a truism to say that this is the generation of gut reaction and objections to the conceptualized. Even those young people who have accepted enough of the Establishment to stay in college and pass the necessary examinations to get into graduate school are far more film than book oriented, and highly impatient of what they feel is irrelevant verbiage and needless erudition. A recent article by Hans Strupp (1976) on "Irrationalism and Erosion of Excellence" expresses the dilemma that many of us have encountered. Here is another expression of this concern.
There is at present an unmistakable trend toward introversion again. … As is always the case in such a movement, the danger is that many would not only reject extrastension but also disciplined reasoning. Materialism thus becomes mysticism and cultism. The fact that introversion was considered