It’s About Time We Trashed the Questionable Rorschach
By: Dr. Patricia Farrell
Tags: Research, Rorschach Tests, Psychology, Life, Mental Health

It’s About Time We Trashed the Questionable Rorschach

A too-revered psychological test with questionable validity needs to be trashed.

Hermann Rorschach, en.Wikipedia.org

The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well. — Alfred Adler

Handsome with a head of thick blonde hair, he loved to doodle (his father was an art teacher), and his classmates noticed it. As a result of his absent-minded drawings, he earned the nickname Klex “Inkblot,” and therein lay his questionable claim to fame. He was Hermann Rorschach.

The end of his life would come unexpectedly in 1922 at 37 as he lay in a Swiss hospital suffering from what is reported to be peritonitis from a burst appendix.

After his death, the test that Rorschach devised on limited work with many friends, associates, and patients would become somewhat of a “golden standard” for assessing the unconscious mind. Waxing vaingloriously on the test's value, psychologists would include it as an essential part of their armamentarium for mental health assessment; they were misled.

In recent years, critics have voiced numerous concerns about the Comprehensive System (CS; Exner…)the most popular system for administering, scoring, and interpreting the Rorschach…According to critics, the CS norms are in error and can make relatively normal individuals appear to have serious psychopathology.”

If a test is so definitively spot-on in its calculations, what would be the reason so many scoring variations would crop up? Aside from Exner, who seemed to lead the field, there are scoring methods by Beck, Klopfer, and Piotrowski, among others.

The angry and malicious comments aimed at those who would question debunking the Rorschach test have been legion.

In journal articles and public presentations , the psychologists, from Emory, Harvard, the University of Texas and other institutions, have challenged the validity of widely used diagnostic tools like the Rorschach inkblot test. They have questioned the existence of repressed memories of child sexual abuse and of multiple personality disorder. They have attacked the wide use of labels like codependency and sexual addiction.

The entire question of multiple personalities that received wide public appeal after “The Three Faces of Eve” and “Sybil” is grist for another mill, not today. The psychiatrist had a somewhat concerning relationship with her patient. And sexual addiction has its detractors, too.

Photo by amirali mirhashemian

Where’s the Beef?

As a younger psychologist, I had been trained that the Rorschach cards were sacrosanct and not given or shown to anyone. To buy them you had to have a letter from your school and proper identification. They could not be sold by you to another classmate or anyone else.

In fact, if anyone were to allude to the cards in any way, there was to be a concerted effort to distort it to protect the integrity of the scoring system.

Seeing the media-psychologist, Dr. Joyce Brothers, display one of the actual cards on a program once, I was shocked. But Brothers didn’t have to worry; she was not in clinical practice (her degree was in experimental psychology), and I believe she wasn’t a member of The American Psychological Association.

Years later, I would sit in an editorial office across from the man who wrote Brothers’ newspaper column; he had no college degree or psychology training. He never wrote about the Rorschach, just how to keep a husband happy and coming home each evening.

Whether the Rorschach is a valid test of pathology or personality has received attention from those in academia and publishing. An extensive review of tests, including the Rorschach, used in deciding forensic cases appeared in one journal.

For their review, Neal and her colleagues gathered results from 22 surveys of psychologists who serve as forensic experts in legal cases. They reviewed the 364 psychological assessment tools that the respondents reported having used in providing expert evidence. They found that nearly all of those tools have been subjected to scientific testing, but only about 67 percent are generally accepted by the psychological community at large. What’s more, only 40% of the tools have generally favorable reviews in handbooks and other sources of information about psychological tests.

Even in cases where the evidence is based on shoddy, unacceptable psychological testing, the courts don’t refuse to accept it. How many defendants have been damaged or had their lives ruined in this way?

Who Are the Guardians at the Gate?

Consumers, aka patients, have come to expect that any testing they will receive will be reliable and accepted by the medical or psychological community. Yet, evidence exists to refute this misplaced trust when it comes to psychological testing.

Some vociferously defend the Rorschach as though it were worthy of such efforts, and it appears it’s not.

Who will protect all of us from this misguided use of this type of testing? And I would suggest that this is not the only test that requires staunch restraints on its use because of its lack of adequate research on validity.

The professional organizations are there for a reason; ethical codes are there to protect patients. But is adequate action being taken to remove questionable testing from the field to protect everyone?

Continued vigilance is necessitated because professionals who espouse certain tests are still inculcating trainees with a distorted view of these tests. It is a mental infection that must be cured with the appropriate action.