![]() Right at the beginning of the book I learned that the Rorschach test involves only ten different inkblot cards, and though it has no active copyright and can be viewed on the Internet and in books, the actual blots are secured by The Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association. ![]() created a window into the soul that we have been peering through for a century, then died before he could respond to the biggest challenge to his legacy…he inkblots were now let loose on the world, without his guiding hand and eye. (It blindsided me as much as the sudden murder of Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in The Departed did!) From then on The Inkblots is mainly about the inkblots themselves and the evolution, innovation, reiteration and even rejection of Rorschach’s original idea, an idea largely unknown to me, and, I dare say, to most readers out there. When I first picked up The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing by Damion Searls, I thought that I’d be reading a biography of a man whose name was more familiar to me than his actual work, until his death at age 37 in 1922 surprised me hardly a third of the way through the book. Both instances show the test boiled down for popular consumption, nevertheless stressing a fundamental truth: the test was designed by its originator to “follow the conflict between repressing conscious and repressed unconscious.” The comic-book Rorschach believes that “existence is random, has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long.” But Hermann Rorschach, the great psychiatrist – and man who could dilate and contract his pupils at will, believed that there were patterns, so to speak, and that they could be deciphered and comprehended. And, perhaps ironically to a fault, Watchmen’s Rorschach is required to take the test while in prison. Escher’s patterned graphic work.) 24 years after the death of Hermann Rorschach, the psychiatrist who is forever associated with the weird blots due to his breakthrough research and methodology, a movie called The Dark Mirror, starring Olivia de Havilland, presented a mentally disturbed woman taking an inkblot test. (I’m quite surprised at the lack of writing about the inkblot-like vibe in much of M.C. Its now-iconic inkblots have become ingrained in pop culture, far beyond their scientific origins, Andy Warhol’s Rorschach series in the 1980s and a design for Dr. This comic-book character is only a drop of proof of how familiar the mysterious images of the Rorschach test are in modern society. ![]() His futile attempts to fight sin in clear-cut blacks and whites have confused his very identity, and the inexplicably morphing blacks and whites seem to fight to become gray on his mask (his “face”). A and The Question, personifications of a Manichaean version of Objectivism, Rorschach tends to punish criminals without mercy, driven farther into despair by the rape and slaughter of a little girl. Like Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s and Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver, Rorschach admires the good so much, loves love so much, he has died to the good and love he is drowning in the same sewer he wishes to cleanse and hates hate instead of feeling love at all. Modelled after Steve Ditko’s Ayn Rand-inspired Mr. For me, the most sympathetic character in Alan Moore’s graphic-novel masterpiece, Watchmen, is Rorschach: a gritty, psychologically conflicted, fedora- and trench coat-clad vigilante who hides his face with an inkblot-printed mask (hence his alias). ![]()
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