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This response should begin by supplying and amplifying the references Strauss rightly calls for, namely, those indicating Hermann Rorschach's personal belief that his method included the key for understanding remote cultures. Professor Henri Ellenberger has given us the only published biographical study of Rorschach's life and work. Ellenberger was a personal friend, and his manuscript was prepared after long discussions with Rorschach's wife, herself a Russian-born psychiatrist. Ellenberger states:
Rorschach believed, for instance, that a systematic study of paintings of past centuries, analyzing the expression of movement and the use of colour [i.e. the experience-balance in Rorschach terminology], would make possible a reconstruction of the mentality of the corresponding epochs. Thus, he considered his Psychodiagnostik a universal key for the deciphering and understanding of human culture and civilization, throughout all the world and all the centuries (ELLENBERGER I, p. 204).
The strange and bewildering Psychodiagnostik (RORSCHACH 7) is a pot-pourri of clinical wisdom and technical detail. Chapter four, entitled simply ‘Results’, contains a profound and far-reaching grasp of the nature of creativity, especially understood through the implications of the experience-balance, or Erlebnistypus. The experience-balance reflects the relationship