The inkblots : Hermann Rorschach, his iconic test, and the power of seeing / Damion Searls.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Searls, Damion, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rorschach, Hermann, 1884-1922.

Rorschach, Hermann.

Psychiatrists--Switzerland--Biography.

Psychiatrists.

Rorschach Test.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

x, 405 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Crown Publishing, [2017]

Summary:

"In 1917, working alone in a remote Swiss asylum, psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach devised an experiment to probe the human mind: a set of ten carefully designed inkblots. For years, he had grappled with the theories of Freud and Jung while also absorbing the aesthetic movements of the day, from Futurism to Dadaism. A visual artist himself, Rorschach had come to believe that who we are is less a matter of what we say, as Freud thought, than what we see...In this first-ever biography of Rorschach, Damion Searls draws on unpublished letters and diaries and a cache of previously unknown interviews with Rorschach's family, friends, and colleagues to tell the unlikely story of the test's creation, its controversial reinvention, and its remarkable endurance--and what it all reveals about the power of perception."--From dust jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: tea leaves

All becomes movement and life

Klex

I want to read people

Extraordinary discoveries and warring worlds

A path of one's own

Little inkblots full of shapes

Hermann Rorschach feels his brain being sliced apart

The darkest and most elaborate delusions

Pebbles in a riverbed

A very simple experiment

It provokes interest and head-shaking everywhere

The psychology he sees is his psychology

Right on the threshold to a better future

The inkblots come to America

Fascinating, stunning, creative, dominant

The queen of tests

Iconic as a stethoscope

The Nazi Rorschachs

A crisis of images

The system

Different people see different things

Beyond true or false

Looking ahead

The Rorschach test is not a Rorschach test

Appendix: The Rorschach family

Hermann Rorschach's character by Olga Rorschach-Shtempelin.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Jones Fund bookplate.

Other Format:

Online version:

Searls, Damion. Inkblots

ISBN:

9780804136549 : HRD

0804136548 : HRD