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This Rorschach test seems to have been well administered in the manner originally laid out by Herman Rorschach (1942). However, from the vantage point of what modern Rorschach administration and recording requires (Schafer, 1954), this document lacks essential features. The recording is not verbatim; it includes neither behavioral notes nor the verbal formulations and transactions between tester and subject. Also, there is no location sheet that outlines responses clearly, no account of the patient's understanding of the purpose of the testing, and no context provided by the results of a battery of other tests. Nevertheless, the existing record seems to allow a significant amount of reasonably confident interpretation.
An additional question must be raised about my interpretation: has my familiarity with the case of the Wolf Man through my studies and teaching guided my analysis of this Rorschach record to such an extent that it could be thought that I was simply finding what I was looking for? The question becomes only slightly less pressing if I declare that with an age-appropriate, somewhat spotty memory and with my not having studied, taught or kept up with ‘the latest’ on the Wolf Man, I consciously recall only scraps of what was once thoroughly familiar; yet I do know I would instantly recognize the details were they presented to me. Offsetting the implications of these considerations is the fact that the patterning of content and formal features of his Rorschach responses point in a very obvious way to the realm of interpretations that includes the very ones I put forward. So much is this so that I felt compelled in drafting the following report (see below) to question whether, to some extent, the subject was responding in a contrived, preconceived manner. Also, the interpretations I developed are not altogether in the direction that I, knowing that the Wolf Man was the subject, had expected: there were surprises.
This man's funct