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Almost a century has passed since a young Swiss psychiatrist named Hermann Rorschach succeeded in publishing his psychological test based on ten cards of equal size, each bearing an inkblot-based image. The Rorschach Test quickly became a universal, if controversial, instrument of clinical, forensic, and investigative value, and it remains of interest to this date. Remarkably, The Inkblots is the first comprehensive study of its creator's life, career, and the vicissitudes of his project over the decades, particularly in Europe and the United States, and specifically in the world of psychoanalysis.
Author Damion Searls has written extensively as a translator and scholar, but this book is his first venture into the field of psychology. Based on exceptional research that includes material only recently made available, Searls richly traces Rorschach's life, beginning with his childhood in Zurich, where his father was a painter and art teacher. He experienced early parental loss, but he performed exceptionally in school in Schaffhausen; in his extracurricular language studies in Dijon, France (French and Russian); and, ultimately, in medical school in (once again) Zurich. It was there that he became close to a group of Russian students, including one Olga, whom he ultimately married, and it was there that he was first exposed to psychiatry, in the persons of Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung. Through both, he learned of Freud's ideas, which he “both respected … and preserved a certain skepticism [toward] … . He would continue to use psychoanalysis while remaining clear about its limitations” (p. 48).
Following his graduation, Rorschach moved about, working for periods in German, Russian, and Swiss hospitals until he settled with Olga in the Swiss town of Herisau—where, Searls states, he “lived longer than anywhere else except Schaffhausen” (p. 102). And it was there, in 1917, that he created the inkblot test that immortalized his name.
Others had experimented with inkblots as in