It has been suggested that Rorschach's use of inkblots may have been influenced by German doctor Justinus Kerner who, in 1857, had published a popular book of poems, each of which was inspired by an accidental inkblot.

Although he had served as Vice President of the Swiss Psychoanalytic Society, Rorschach had difficulty in publishing the book and it attracted little attention when it first appeared. After experimenting with several hundred inkblots which he drew himself, he selected a set of ten for their diagnostic value. Īfter studying 300 mental patients and 100 control subjects, in 1921 Hermann Rorschach wrote his book Psychodiagnostik, which was to form the basis of the inkblot test. The Rorschach test, however, was the first systematic approach of this kind. Interpretation of inkblots was central to a game, Gobolinks, from the late 19th century. The use of interpreting 'ambiguous designs' to assess an individual's personality is an idea that goes back to Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli. Hermann Rorschach created the inkblot test in 1921. The areas of dispute include the objectivity of testers, inter-rater reliability, the verifiability and general validity of the test, bias of the test's pathology scales towards greater numbers of responses, the limited number of psychological conditions which it accurately diagnoses, the inability to replicate the test's norms, its use in court-ordered evaluations, and the proliferation of the ten inkblot images, potentially invalidating the test for those who have been exposed to them. Īlthough the Exner Scoring System (developed since the 1960s) claims to have addressed and often refuted many criticisms of the original testing system with an extensive body of research, some researchers continue to raise questions. In the 1960s, the Rorschach was the most widely used projective test. The Rorschach can be thought of as a psychometric examination of pareidolia, the active pattern of perceiving objects, shapes, or scenery as meaningful things to the observer's experience, the most common being faces or other pattern of forms that are not present at the time of the observation. The test is named after its creator, Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach. It has been employed to detect underlying thought disorder, especially in cases where patients are reluctant to describe their thinking processes openly. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person's personality characteristics and emotional functioning. The Rorschach test is a projective psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Rorschach inkblot test, the Rorschach technique, inkblot test The first of the ten cards in the Rorschach test.

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