Blot Test

Swiss Psychiatrist Hermann Rohrschach started something when he began making blot-pictures, by folding a piece of paper on a blob of ink. He showed the "pictures" to patients in a sanitarium and asked them what they saw. He tried hundreds of blot-pictures, finally selected ten which seemed to bring out the clearest responses. Today, after 20 years, psychologists all over the world have adopted his blots, use the Rohrschach Test not only to ferret out neuroses but also for vocational testing.

Published last week was one of the few manuals in English on the Rohrschach lest (The Clinical Application of the Rohrschach Test, by Ruth Bochner and Florence Halpern; Grune & Stratton; $3). Written by psychologists from Manhattan's Bellevue, it was no work for the layman. But it did show that this serious test could be as much fun as a parlor game.

Mechanism of the test is simple: the subject looks at the ten blots one after another and tells what he sees in each. But interpreting the results of the test is a matter for an expert. No one answer ever gives the whole story: a child of six reacts one way, a man of 60 another.

People who make quick, obvious answers and pass on to the next card are apt to be "conformist" types, anxious to be popular and avoid trouble. Those who see each blot as several different pictures are likely to have active and vivid emotions, while those who see shapes only in small details are often repressed.

If a subject is out of kilter with his general environment, he may see shapes not in the black or colored blobs but in the white space around them. People with stereotyped minds see mostly the forms of animals; hypochondriacs see parts of the human body.

For each of the ten blots there are some more or less standard answers. In the blot above (see cut) the most usual picture is two waiters bowing to each other, but alcoholics may see two drunks leaning over a table, while happy people call them dancers.

The other blot is apt to frighten subjects who are unhappy or unstable, but "normal" people merely call it a bearskin rug or an animal's skin. Schizoid personalities sometimes see a man's face in the dark shadows, but sexually frustrated women see a gorilla or some other strong masculine figure, chasing them.

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