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Given the opportunity to review this replacement and annotated version of Rorschach's Psychodiagnostics is both a blessing and a curse. As someone who has been enthralled by the heuristic value of the Rorschach inkblot method (RIM) since I began graduate school in 1976, I relished the chance to speak to this wellspring of nuanced thought about the task and its utility. I was so fortunate to be trained by such giants in our field as Irene Fast, Tom Cummings, Sid Blatt, and especially Marty Mayman that I have long felt part of the generational links from David Rapaport to the others I just listed and on to my nearly 500 doctoral students. This is indeed the blessed aspect of being asked to review the work that spawned Rapaport's initial interest in the task. Having also spent the past 39 years and counting teaching the Rorschach, first at what was then called Roosevelt Hospital in New York and then for the past 37 years at City College's Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology, I could not help but read the work from the point of view of a student first learning about the RIM. This would indeed be the “curse” of providing this review. Would I be able to deem the book to be a valuable teaching device, especially in the context of teaching the RIM through a psychodynamic lens, as I have done all this time? I was first trained to score the RIM using the approach developed by Klopfer et al. (1954) with form level scoring by Mayman's (unpublished, 1971) method and then later via the thought disorder system developed by Blatt and Ritzler (1974) and the Mutuality of Autonomy scale developed by Urist (1977). Would Rorschach's opus be a suitable replacement or addition for my students in their development as Rorschach assessors, thus became the central question I needed to stress as I reviewed the work.
Regrettably, although the book has many wonderful virtues, I do not think it fills the bill as the prime text from which to teach the Rorschach to beginners. The book is a remar