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Of the various psychological tests that comprise the typical clinical battery, the Rorschach is not only the oldest test but it is also the test subject to what is far and away the most lavish technical literature. To remind ourselves of this state of affairs—that the Rorschach is forty years old and has been ruthlessly studied—usually requires a moment's reflection; we are still prone to think of the Rorschach as some relatively unestablished procedure. Even the clinician who routinely administers the Rorschach passes his first plate to his patient, and if he experiences anything about the test, he is apt to be aware of a sense of daring, as though he is about to obtain some dreadful data, the interpretation of which he prays will involve something more reputable on his part than plain audacity. This quality of uncertainty about the Rorschach, which no amount of training and study ever wholly relieves, seems more appropriate a reason than merely care or modesty for Hermann Rorschach's having referred to his invention not as a test but as an experiment. But while it is true that the experiment is still going strong, quite enough of it has been worked out over the past four decades to necessitate a revision of the form of certain questions we have been accustomed to putting to the Rorschach. Certain long-standing questions have failed to remain sufficiently informed and cogent to yield worthwhile answers. For example, only a nag continues to complain wildly about the Rorschach's “validity” and a admonish us for its “unscientific subjectivity.” (And by the same token, only a boor continues to extol the Rorschach as a license to unleash the interpreter's “intuitive” and “creative” enthusiasms.)
Murray Sherman's A Rorschach Reader could not have arrived at a more timely moment in the development of the Rorschach. Here is a sobering, non-partisan presentation of twenty-eight Rorschach studies by top-level experts of varying persuasions. The collection, spanning back to 19