Comment

THIS ATTEMPT by McCully to link Jungian psychology with projective techniques had a strong appeal for me since in my own work with projective tests I, too, was concerned to draw attention to the much neglected area of interpreting thematic test material in accordance with analytical psychology (STRAUSS 3, p. 335). But whereas my approach was largely that of the clinician occupied with individual dynamics McCully, in this present paper, aims at studying ‘man's collective substance’, making a scientific attempt, if I have understood him rightly, to validate the collective unconscious by means of projective tests and, in particular, the Rorschach.

To what extent McCully has succeeded in his aim is an open question. To say that ‘the Rorschach blots are of great significance because they may be analogous to the structure of the psyche itself’ seems provocative; but in his book, Rorschach theory and symbolism (McCULLY 2, p. 51), the author deals at great length with such a postulate, holding that the common denominator of both the Rorschach blots and the structure of the psyche lies in the power of the archetype: a remarkable, but not altogether convincing, idea.

However, the suggestion that the Rorschach has great significance beyond its usefulness in ‘tessing out’ pathology is a valuable one, though I wish McCully had given a precise reference with regard to Rorschach's ‘prediction’, in his Psychodiagnostics, that his method included the key to understanding remote cultures. His statement that ‘a chief purpose for us has been to catch hands with Rorschach's dream about how his technique might lead us into understanding remote epochs’ (Ibid., p. 244) seems important for an understanding of the paper under discussion. McCully holds, for instance, that ‘the structure of the Rorschach plates contains visual forms that are much more meaningless to us than they would have been to Paleolithic men. For that reason, through by-passing awareness, the stimuli reach into our root sub