A whole issue of the Menninger Bulletin is taken up by this study of Rorschach by Ellenberger, who once worked in a hospital where Rorschach had worked and who consulted friends, teachers, colleagues, and relatives of Rorschach, and consulted old records to gather information. Rorschach died in 1922 at the age of thirty-seven, nine months after the publication of his Psychodiagnostik which, after being neglected and attacked by academic psychologists, was only beginning to receive recognition. At the time of his death, caused by a neglected appendicitis, he had earned only five dollars from his test.

Rorschach as a medical student, after seeing his first autopsy, dreamed that his brain was being sliced and that he felt the slices falling forward, exactly as he had seen them fall in the autopsy. This experiencing of optical images as kinesthetic images led to his interest in synkinetic phenomena and to his invention of the diagnostic test.