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Following recent articles in The Psychologist on the Rorschach test, JOHN T. E. RICHARDSON looks at its prehistory.
FROM at least the time of Leonardo da Vinci, artists and scholars have described the imaginative interpretation of naturally occurring phenomena such as rocks or cloud formations. Many early psychologists devised their own materials to investigate these processes in the form of inkblots. The use of inkblots is often associated with the psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, but its origins lie in children's games, experiments on visual perception, studies of the effects of hashish, the testing of immigrants at Ellis Island and the work of Frederic Bartlett.
In the latter part of the 19th century, games involving the construction and imaginative interpretation of inkblots were played by children on both sides of the Atlantic. In continental Europe these were known as 'Klecksography', a name that probably originated in the title of a book containing inkblots and their interpretations that was published by justinus Kerner in Tubingen in 1854 (see Ellenberger, 1954). In North America a similar game was described in 1896 by Ruth McEnery Stuart and Albeit Bigelow Paine in Gobolinks, or Shadow Pictures for Young and Old. This book provided about 100 examples of how to construct inkblots and use them as prompts for making up imaginative verse (Popplestone & McPherson, 1994).
The first suggestion that inkblots might be used in psychological research was made by Binet and Henri (1896), who suggested that the interpretation of inkblots could be used to study variations in 'involuntary imagination'. Binet himself went on to use the description of inkblots as a projective test. It was probably through Binet's influence that the American psychologist Edmund Delabarre compiled a collection of 100 inkblots around the turn of the century for use in his own research on the effects of hashish (Popplestone & McPherson, 1994). In Moscow, Binet's work led Theodor...