Assignment: Clinical Personality Assessments

Chapter 11

RORSCHACH INKBLOT METHOD

The preceding five chapters have presented the most commonly used self-report inventories
for assessing personality functioning. As noted in Chapter 1, inventories of this kind differ
in several respects from performance-based personality measures. Self-report inventories
provide direct assessments of personality characteristics in which people are asked to
describe themselves by indicating whether certain statements apply to them. Performance­
based measures are an indirect approach in which personality characteristics are inferred
from the way people respond to various standardized tasks. Self-report and performance­
based methods both bring advantages and limitations to the assessment process, as discussed
in Chapters 1 and 2, and there are many reasons personality assessments should ordinarily
be conducted with a multifaceted test battery that includes both kinds of measures (see
pp. 13-15 and 22-26).

This and the following three chapters address the most widely used performance-based
measures of personality functioning: the Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM), the Thematic
Apperception Test (TAT), figure drawing methods, and sentence completion methods. These
and other performance-based personality measures have traditionally been referred to as
projective tests and are still commonly labeled this way. As pointed out in concluding
Chapter 1, however, “projective” is not an apt categorization of these measures, and con­
temporary assessment psychologists prefer more accurate descriptive labels for them such
as performance-based.

NATURE OF THE RORSCHACH INKBLOT METHOD

The Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM) consists of 10 inkblots printed individually on 6 %”
by 9 %” cards. Five of these blots are printed in shades of gray and black (Cards I and
IV-VII); two of the blots are in shades of red, gray, and black (Cards II and III); and the
remaining three blots are in shades of various pastel colors (Cards VIII-X). In what is
called the Response Phase of a Rorschach examination, people are shown the cards one
at a time and asked to say what they see in them. In the subsequent Inquiry Phase of the
examination, persons being examined are asked to indicate where in the blots they saw each
of the percepts they reported and what made those percepts look the way they did.

These procedures yield three sources of data. First, the manner in which people structure
their responses identifies how they are likely to structure other situations in their lives.
People who base most of their responses on the overall appearance of the inkblots and pay
little attention to separate parts of them are likely to be individuals who tend to form global
impressions of situations and ignore or overlook details of these situations. Conversely,

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346 Performance-Based Measures

people who base most of their responses on parts of the blots and seldom make use of
an entire blot are often people who become preoccupied with the details of situations
and fail to grasp their overall significance-as in “not being able to see the forest for the
trees.” As another example of response structure, people who report seeing objects that are
shaped similarly to the part of the blot where they are seeing them are likely in general
to perceive people and events accurately, and hence to show adequate reality testing. By
contrast, people who give numerous perceptually inaccurate responses that do not resemble
the shapes of the blots are prone in general to form distorted impressions of what they see,
and hence to show impaired reality testing.

As a second source of data, Rorschach responses frequently contain content themes
that provide clues to a person’s underlying needs, attitudes, and concerns. People who
consistently describe human figures they see in the inkblots as being angry, carrying
weapons, or fighting with each other may harbor concerns that other people are potentially
dangerous to them, or they may view interpersonal relationships as typified by competition
and strife. Conversely, a thematic emphasis on people described as friendly, as carrying
a peace offering, or as helping each other in a shared endeavor probably reveals a sense
of safety in interpersonal relationships and an expectation that people will interact in
collaborative ways. In similar fashion, recurrent descriptions of people, animals, or objects
seen in the blots as being damaged or dysfunctional (e.g., “a decrepit old person”; “a
wounded bug”; “a piece of machinery that’s rusting away”) may reflect personal concerns
about being injured or defective in some way, or about being vulnerable to becoming injured
or defective.

The third source of data in a Rorschach examination consists of the manner in which
individuals conduct themselves and relate to the examiner, which provides behavioral indi­
cations of how they are likely to deal with task-oriented and interpersonal situations. Some
of the behavioral data that emerge during a Rorschach examination resemble observa­
tions that clinicians can make whenever they are conducting interview or test assessments.
Whether people being assessed seem deferential or antagonistic toward the examiner may
say something about their attitudes toward authority. Whether they appear relaxed or ner­
vous may say something about how self-confident and self-assured they are and about how
they generally respond to being evaluated.

The RIM also provides some test-specific behavioral data in the form of how people
handle the cards and how they frame their responses. Do they carefully hand each card back
to the examiner when they are finished responding to it, or do they carelessly toss the card
on the desk? Do they give definite responses and take responsibility for them (as in “This
one looks to me like a bat”), or do they disavow responsibility and avoid commitment (as
in “It really doesn’t look like anything to me, but if I have to say something, I’d say it might
look something like a bat”)?

To summarize this instrument, then, the RIM involves each of the following three tasks:

1. A perceptual task yielding structural information that helps to identify personality
states and traits

2. An associational task generating content themes that contain clues to a person’s
underlying needs and attitudes

3. A behavioral task that provides a representative sample of an individual’s orientation
to problem-solving and interpersonal situations

Rorschach Inkblot Method 347

In parallel to these three test characteristics, Rorschach assessment measures personality
functioning because the way people go about seeing things in the inkblots reflects how they
look at their world and how they customarily make decisions and deal with events. What
they see in the inkblots provides a window into their inner life and the contents of their
mind, and how they conduct themselves during the examination provides information about
how they usually respond to people and to external demands.

By integrating these structural, thematic, and behavioral features of the data, Rorschach
clinicians can generate comprehensive personality descriptions of the people they examine.
These descriptions typically address adaptive strengths and weaknesses in how people
manage stress, how they attend to and perceive their surroundings, how they form concepts

and ideas, how they experience and express feelings, how they view themselves, and how
they relate to other people. Later sections of this chapter elaborate the codification, scoring,
and interpretation of Rorschach responses and delineate how Rorschach-based descriptions
of personality characteristics facilitate numerous applications of the instrument. As a further
introduction to these topics and to the psychometric features of the RIM, the next two
sections of the chapter review the history of Rorschach assessment and standard procedures
for administering the instrument.

HISTORY

Of the personality assessment instruments discussed in this text, the Rorschach Inkblot
Method has the longest and most interesting history because it was shaped by diverse
personal experiences and life events. The inkblot method first took systematic form in the
mind of Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist who lived only 37 years, from 1885
to 1922. As a youth, Rorschach had been exposed to inkblots in the form of a popular
parlor game in tum-of-the-century Europe called Klecksographie. Klecks is the German
word for “blot,” and the Klecksographie game translates loosely into English as “Blotto.”
The game was played by dropping ink in the middle of a piece of paper, folding the paper
in half to make a more or less symmetrical blot, and then competing to see who among
the players could generate the most numerous or interesting descriptions of the blots or
suggest associations to what they resembled. According to available reports, Rorschach’s
enthusiasm for this game, which appealed to adolescents as well as adults, and his creativity
in playing it led to his being nicknamed “Klex” by his high school classmates (Exner, 2003,
chap. 1).

From 1917 to 1919, while serving as Associate Director of the Krombach Mental
Hospital in Herisau, Switzerland, Rorschach pursued a notion he had formed earlier in
his career that patients with different types of mental disorders would respond to inkblots
differently from each other and from psychologically healthy people. To test this notion, he
constructed and experimented with a large number of blots, but these were not the accidental
ink splotches of the parlor games. Rorschach was a skilled amateur artist who left behind
an impressive portfolio of drawings that can be viewed in the Rorschach Archives and
Museum in Bern, Switzerland. The blots with which he experimented were carefully drawn
by him, and over time he selected a small set that seemed particularly effective in eliciting
responses and reflecting individual differences.

348 Performance-Based Measures

Rorschach then administered his selected set of blots to samples of 288 mental hos­
pital patients and 117 nonpatients, using a standard instruction, “What might this be?”
Rorschach published his findings from this research in a 1921 monograph titled Psychodi­
agnostics (Rorschach, 1921/1942). The materials and methods described by Rorschach
in Psychodiagnostics provided the basic foundation for the manner in which Rorschach
assessment has been most commonly practiced since that time, and the standard Rorschach
plates used today are the same 10 inkblots that were published with Rorschach’s original
monograph.

Rorschach’s monograph was nevertheless a preliminary work, and he was just beginning
to explore potential refinements and applications of the inkblot method when he succumbed
a year after its publication to peritonitis, following a ruptured appendix. The monograph
itself did not attract much attention initially, and the method might have succumbed along
with its creator were it not for the efforts of a few close friends and colleagues of Rorschach
who were devoted to keeping the method alive. Their efforts were facilitated by the fact that
Switzerland in the 1920s was a Mecca for medical scientists and researchers, who visited
from many parts of the world to study with famous physicians at Swiss hospitals and
medical schools. Some of these visiting scholars and practitioners heard about Rorschach’s
method while they were in Switzerland and took copies of the inkblots home with them.
As a result, articles on the Rorschach were published during the 1920s in such diverse
countries as Russia, Peru, and Japan.

Turning to how the Rorschach came to the United States, an American psychiatrist named
David Levy went to Zurich in the mid-1920s to study for a year with Emil Oberholzer, a
prominent psychoanalyst who had been one of Rorschach’s good friends and supporters.
Levy returned to the United States with several copies of the inkblots, and that is how the
Rorschach came to America. Levy’s interests lay elsewhere, and the Rorschach materials
languished for a time in his desk at the New York Institute of Guidance. Then, in 1929,
Samuel Beck, a graduate student at Columbia University who was doing a fellowship at the
Institute, mentioned to Levy that he was looking for a dissertation topic. Levy told Beck
about the Rorschach materials he had brought back from Switzerland and suggested that
Beck might do a research project with them. Acting on this suggestion, Beck earned his
doctorate with a Rorschach standardization study of children. While collecting his data,
Beck published the first two English language articles on the method in 1930 (Beck, 1930a,
1930b). He followed these articles 7 years later with Introduction to the Rorschach Met hod,
which was the first English language monograph on the Rorschach, and in 1944 with the
first edition of his basic text, Rorschach’s Test: I. Basic Processes (Beck, 1937, 1944).
Throughout a long, productive career, Beck remained an influential figure in Rorschach
assessment, and his contributions became internationally known and respected.

In 1934, Beck went to Switzerland for a year’s study with Oberholzer, and his departure
coincided with the arrival from Zurich of another Rorschach pioneer, Bruno Klopfer.
Klopfer had received a doctorate in educational psychology in 1922 and by 1933 had
advanced to a senior staff position at the Berlin Information Center for Child Guidance. He
also had become interested in Jungian psychoanalytic theory and was in the final phases
of completing training as a Jungian analyst. However, the restrictions being placed on
Jews in Adolf Hitler’s Germany at that time led Klopfer to an advisedly dim view of his
future professional prospects in Berlin, and he decided to move to Zurich. Without a job
in Zurich, he was helped by Carl Jung to obtain a position as a technician at the Zurich

Rorschach Inkblot Method 349

Psychotechnic Institute. Klopfer’s responsibilities at the Institute included psychological
testing of applicants for various jobs, and the Rorschach was among the tests he was
required to use for this purpose. He had no previous interest or experience in testing, but

he soon became intrigued with the ways in which Rorschach responses could reveal the
underlying thoughts and feelings of the people he was testing.

Klopfer was dissatisfied with his low status as a technician and soon began looking for
other opportunities. His search resulted in his being appointed as a research associate in the
Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, where he began working in 1934.
Having learned of his arrival on campus, a group of psychology graduate students asked their
department to arrange for Klopfer to give them some Rorschach training. Unimpressed with
Klopfer’s credentials, the department declined to hire him for this purpose. The students
were not deterred, however, and they approached Klopfer privately about offering some
evening seminars for them in his home, which he agreed to do.

Giving these seminars for this and subsequent groups of students and professionals
produced a network of Klopfer-trained psychologists who were eager to keep in touch
with each other and continue exchanging ideas about the Rorschach. In response to this
interest, Klopfer in 1936 founded the Rorschach Research Exchange, which has been
published regularly since that time and evolved into the contemporary Journal ofPersonality
Assessment. In 1938, Klopfer founded the Rorschach Institute, a scientific and professional
organization that continues to function actively today, and more broadly than Klopfer
envisioned, as the Society for Personality Assessment. Klopfer’s first Rorschach book, The
Rorschach Technique, appeared in 1942, but it was not until 1954 that he published his
definitive basic text, Developments in the Rorschach Technique: Volume 1. Technique and
Theory (Klopfer, Ainsworth, Klopfer, & Holt, 1954; Klopfer & Kelley, 1942).

Because one of them needed a dissertation topic and the other needed a job, then,
these two Rorschach pioneers were drawn into a lifetime engagement with the inkblot
method. Like Beck, Klopfer gained international acclaim for his teaching and writing
about Rorschach assessment. Regrettably for the development of the instrument, Beck and
Klopfer approached their work from very different perspectives. Having been educated in
an experimentally oriented department of psychology, Beck was interested in describing
personality characteristics and was firmly committed to advancing knowledge through
controlled research designs and empirical data collection. He stuck closely to Rorschach’s
original procedures for administration and coding, and he favored a primarily quantitative
approach to Rorschach interpretation. With respect to the distinction between nomothetic
and idiographic approaches in personality assessment discussed in Chapters 1 (pp. 12-13)
and 2 (p. 34 ), Beck was very much in the nomothetic camp.

Klopfer, on the other hand, was a Jungian analyst at heart and an enthusiast for idiography.
He had a strong interest in symbolic meanings and with umaveling the phenomenology of
each person’s human experience. He employed qualitative approaches to interpretation that
Beck considered inappropriate, and he added many new response codes and summary scores
on the basis of imaginative ideas rather than research data, which Beck found unacceptable.

These differences in perspective led Beck and Klopfer to formulate and promulgate
distinctive Rorschach systems that involved dissimilar approaches to administering, scoring,
and interpreting the test. Divergence in method did not stop with these two pioneers,
however. In the early 1930s, Beck talked about his Rorschach research with Marguerite
Hertz, the wife of an old friend of his, who was working on her doctorate in psychology

350 Performance-Based Measures

at Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Hertz became an ardent enthusiast for the
value of Rorschach assessment, especially in working with children. She developed some
distinctive variations of her own in Rorschach administration, scoring, and interpretation,
and, in the course of a long and productive life as a university professor, she taught her
approach to many generations of graduate students and workshop participants.

Klopfer’s first seminar group included several psychology graduate students and a friend
of one of these students who had encouraged him to sit in. This friend was Zygmunt
Piotrowski, who at the time was a postdoctoral fellow at the Neuropsychiatric Institute in
New York. Piotrowski had received a doctorate in experimental psychology in Poland
in 1927 and was in the United States for advanced study in neuropsychology. Aside
from curiosity, he had little interest in Rorschach assessment when he joined Klopfer’s
seminar group. However, he soon began to contemplate the possibility that persons with
various kinds of neurological disorders might respond to the inkblots in ways that would
help identify their condition. Piotrowski subsequently pioneered in conducting Rorschach
research with brain-injured patients, and he developed many creative ideas about how the
inkblot method should be conceived, coded, and interpreted. These new ideas coalesced
into a Rorschach system that Piotrowski called Perceptanalysis (Piotrowski, 1957). Like
Beck, Klopfer, and Hertz, Piotrowski worked productively throughout a long life during
which his courses, publications, and lectures introduced a loyal following to his particular
Rorschach system.

This early history of the Rorschach in America came to a close with the arrival in
the United States of another refugee from Europe, David Rapaport, a psychoanalytically
oriented doctoral-level psychologist who fled his native Hungary in 1938. In 1940, Rapaport
joined the staff of the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, where 2 years later he
became head of the psychology department His responsibilities at the Foundation included
mounting a research project to evaluate the utility of a battery of psychological tests for
describing people and facilitating differential diagnosis. The Rorschach was part of this
test battery, and Rapaport’s collaborators in the project included Roy Schafer, who was an
undergraduate psychology student at the time and completed his doctoral studies several
years later at Clark University, after moving from the Menninger Foundation to the Austen
Riggs Center in Massachusetts (see Schafer, 2006).

Rapaport’s psychoanalytic perspectives and many original ideas that he and Schafer
formed about how to elicit and interpret Rorschach responses resulted in their using a
modified inkblot method that differed substantially from any of the previous methods.
Publication of a 2-volume treatise based on the Menninger research project and subsequent
influential books by Schafer established the Rapaport/Schafer system as another alternative
for practitioners and researchers to consider in their work with the Rorschach (Rapaport,
Gill, & Schafer, 1946/1968; Schafer, 1948, 1954).

By 1950, then, there were five different Rorschach systems in the United States, each
with its own adherents. Moreover, even though the Beck and Klopfer systems had become
well-known abroad, the Rorschach landscape also included distinctive systems developed
in other countries and popular among psychologists in Europe, South America, and Japan.
This diversity of method made it difficult for Rorschach practitioners to communicate with
each other and almost impossible for researchers to cumulate systematic data concerning
the reliability of Rorschach findings and their validity for particular purposes. This problem
persisted until the early 1970s, when John Exner undertook to resolve it by standardizing

Rorschach Inkblot Method 351

the Rorschach method in a conceptually reasonable and psychometrically sound manner.
Having conducted a detailed comparative analysis of the five American systems (Exner,
1969), Exner instituted a research program to measure the impact of the different methods
of administration used in the systems and to identify which of their response codes could be
explained clearly and coded reliably. Drawing on what appeared to be the best features of
each of the five American systems, Exner combined them into a Rorschach Comprehensive
System (CS) that he published in 1974 (Exner, 1974).

The Rorschach CS provides specific and detailed instructions for administration and
coding that are to be followed in exactly the same way in every instance. Now in its
fourth edition (Exner, 2003), the CS has become by far the most frequently used Rorschach
system in the United States as well as in many other countries of the world. Widespread
adoption of the CS standardization has made possible the development of large sample
normative standards and international collaboration in examining cross-cultural similarities
and differences in Rorschach responses. The cross-cultural applicability of Rorschach
assessment has provided a unique large-scale opportunity to compare and understand
different cultures from all over the world (see Shaffer, Erdberg, & Meyer, 2007).

Standard Rorschach procedures have also fostered systematic collection and comparison
of data concerning intercoder agreement, retest reliability, and criterion, construct, and
incremental validity, both in the United States and abroad, which are reviewed later in the
chapter. The advent of the CS has additionally allowed clinicians who use it to exchange
information about Rorschach findings with confidence that these findings are based on the
same method of obtaining and codifying the data. The next two sections of the chapter
provide an overview of the CS administration and coding procedures.

ADMINISTRATION

To preserve standardization for the reasons just mentioned, Rorschach examiners should
follow as closely as possible the administration and coding procedures delineated for the
CS by Exner (2003). Prior to beginning the testing, as discussed in Chapter 2, the examiner
should have discussed with the person being evaluated such matters as the purposes of the
assessment and how and to whom the results will be communicated. People are entitled
to information about these matters, and even a brief discussion of them can be helpful in
establishing rapport, reducing concerns the person may have about being examined, and
clarifying misconceptions about the testing process. Typically, the RIM is part of a test
battery that can be introduced in general terms such as the following: “As for the tests
we ‘re going to do, I’ll be asking you questions about various matters and giving you some
tasks to do; let’s get started, and I’ll show you what each of these tests is like as we do
them.”

In preparing to administer the RIM, the examiner should have the cards face down in a
single pile where they can be seen but not easily reached by the examinee. The examiner
should also sit alongside the person or at an angle that is at least slightly behind the examinee
and out of the person’s direct line of vision. This arrangement makes it easy for people to
show the examiner where on the blots they are seeing their percepts. Avoiding face-to-face
administration also minimizes the possible influence on test responses of an examiner’s
facial expressions or other bodily movements. The Rorschach administration should begin

352 Performance-Based Measures

with the following type of explanation:

The next test we’re going to do is one you may have heard of. It’s often referred to as the
inkblot test, and it’s called that because it consists of a series of cards with blots of ink on
them. The blots aren’t anything in particular, but when people look at them, they see different
things in them. There are 10 of these cards, and I’m going to show them to you one at a time
and ask you what kinds of things you see in them and what they look like to you.

No further explanation should routinely be given of Rorschach procedures or of what can
be learned from Rorschach responses. Should examinees ask, “How does this test work?”

they can be told the following: “The way people look at things says something about what
they are like as a person, and this test will give us information about your personality
that should be helpful in … [some reference to the purpose of the examination].” Should
examinees say something on the order of “So this will be a test of my imagination” or “You
want me to tell you what they remind me of?” the perceptual elements of the Rorschach
task should be emphasized by indicating otherwise: “No, this is a test of what you see
in the blots, and I want you to tell me what they look like to you.” If there are no such
questions or comments that examiners must answer first, they should proceed directly after
their explanation by handing the person Card I and saying, “What might this be?”

People will usually take Card I when it is handed to them and should be asked to do so if
necessary. Having people hold the cards promotes their engagement in the Rorschach task,
and, as mentioned, the manner in which they handle the cards can be a source of useful
behavioral data. In other respects, the individual’s task during the Response Phase of the
administration should be left as unstructured as possible. In response to questions (“How
many responses should I give?” “Can I tum the card?” “Do I use the whole thing or parts
of it as well?”), examiners should provide noncommittal replies (“It’s up to you”; “Any
way you wish”). Should the person begin by saying “It’s an inkblot,” the examiner should
restate the basic instruction: “Yes, that’s right, but what you need to do is tell me what it
looks like to you, what kinds of things you see in it.”

Occasionally, some additional procedures may be necessary to obtain a record of suffi­
cient but manageable length. A minimum of 14 responses is required to ensure the validity
of a Rorschach protocol. Records with fewer than 14 responses are too brief to be entirely
reliable and rarely support valid interpretations. To decrease the risk of ending up with
a record of insufficient length, persons who give only one response to Card I should be
prompted by saying, “If you look at it some more, you’ll see other things as well.” If
the person still does not produce more than one response, the single response should be
accepted and the card taken back. However, individuals who have given just one or two
responses to Card I, and then handed back or put down Cards II, III, or IV after only a
single response, can be offered the following indirect encouragement, should they seem
disengaged from their task and on their way to producing a brief record with fewer than 14
responses: “Wait, don’t hurry through these; we’re in no hurry, take your time.” Should the
Response Phase for all IO cards yield fewer than 14 responses, despite such prompting and
encouragement, the examiner should implement the following instructions:

Now you know how …