Hermann Rorschach, a physician and psychiatrist from the first generation of Freudian psychoanalysts in history, became famous around the world for the famous test that bears his surname: the Rorschach test, better known as a unique test.
Born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1884, he came from a modest family, his father was a modest painter who made a living teaching private art classes, Hermann Rorschach also showed great interest in drawing from an early age, especially liked technical drawing called flexo.
“To diagnose is to name the patient’s suffering. -John Gervas-
Hermann Rorschach was addicted to a game of filling ink paper and then folding it. In this way, he got unique and fun characters. For this reason, his own friends gave him an almost prophetic nickname: Klek. Klek means “stain”.
Hermann Rorschach struggled to choose the work he wanted to do, interested in biology but also in art, eventually decided to study medicine, graduated in 1909 and immediately decided to specialize in psychiatry.
During the development of his studies in psychiatry, he had professors of highly prestigious psychoanalyst, such as Eugen Bleuler and Carl Gustav Jung. Hermann Rorschach was passionate about psychoanalytic ideas and never abandoned them; he was particularly interested in the issue of diagnosis. coined the word “psychodiagnosis. “
Later in his life, he became a doctor in several hospitals, became a manager of a nursing home and also had extensive clinical experience that served as the basis for the design of his famous test.
During these years he read Leonardo da Vinci’s novel, a book by Dmitry Merejkovski published in St. Petersburg in 1902, a passage from the book that caught his attention. One of the characters, Giovanni Boltraffio, followed the moisture stains of an old wall. The text read: “Often on the walls? I said in the middle of the rocks, between the cracks, in the molds of the dammed water [?]. , did you find similarities to wonderful places, mountains, steep peaks, etc. ?
Hermann Rorschach’s life was short. He died prematurely, at the age of 38, in his last three years of life he wrote the work that is still being studied so many years later, is called Psychodiagnosis and was published in 1921, Rorschach defined the basics of his trial. , which he called projective evidence, explained that his goal was to explore the imaginary representations of people, asking them to verbally express their associations with the drawings presented.
Prior to that, Rorschach had studied in detail the mechanisms of dreams, delirium and hallucinations, although he has always been Freud’s disciple, a Junguian influence on his concepts and language is clearly noticeable, he sought internal images and marks of civilization. in the responses of their patients.
For the test he collected 40 images that at first glance are just stains, the patient looks at them and says what he can identify in the drawing; in fact, when applying the Rorschach test, only 15 of these images are used today At that time, the main objective was to determine whether patients were neurotic or psychotic, psychoanalytic concepts that had previously mastered psychiatric medicine.
The Rorschach test is one of the most widely used diagnostic tools in clinical psychology, currently not only used to determine whether a patient is neurotic or psychotic, among many other applications, ranging from identifying the main personality traits to evaluating the professional vocation.
This test is also widely used in the field of forensic medicine, because some experts defending the value of the test believe that the interpretation of the slides is beyond rational control, so the people who perform the test could hardly manipulate the In this way, the Rorschach test would reveal deep aspects of personality and , therefore, it is still used almost 100 years after its creation.
Hermann Rorschach has made great contributions to psychology and psychoanalysis, in some ways his work was incomplete, because his death took him by surprise during the development of his technique, but it has become a milestone, creating a division before and after in research. of the human spirit.