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Jul 29, 2009 11:50 AM | 7
Psychologists are up in arms about the posting of the 10 original Rorschach tests on Wikipedia. As detailed in today's New York Times, many of them fear that the easy availability of the inkblots could undermine their usefulness in assessing personality and mental illness.
But Rorschach tests themselves are not particularly effective in the first place, argue Scott O. Lilienfeld, James M. Wood and Howard N. Garb in the April 2005 issue of Scientific American Mind, "What's Wrong with This Picture?" See what impressions you get from that article.
Image of a Rorschach inkblot image from Wikipedia.
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7 Comments
Add CommentI suggest that psychologists read up on "The Streisand effect". Ultimately they are driving more people towards reading up on the tests and viewing the images.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRorschach testing should be discontinue anyway. AS a psychologist I was made to learn how to give the ink blot test and the interpretation is completely based in Freudian theory which has been debunked for decades. If the basic premise is wrong then whatever is based on that premise cannot be right. No matter what the "experts" in Rorschach testing tell you about their accumulated data.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRorschach test are psycho-mumbo-jumbo. Utterly subjective and utterly pointless.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow does an inkblot tell you ANYTHING about a person?!?!?!?!?!?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am also a psychologist. The Rorschach is not mumbo-jumbo nor is it all subjective. In the last 30 years Exner has developed a very reliable scoring method that has tons of data to support it. A more informed way to look at it is a shortcut to understanding much about a person's personality and dynamics. As with any such instrument, it is easy to over-interpret. It is best used to yield multiple hypotheses that can be verified or not and as such may offer clues that lead to not readily apparent aspects of a person. As for it being completely based on Freudian theory, that is just plain wrong. It would be correct to say it is based on general psychodynamic theory which has had a major resurgence with the recent advances in neuroscience.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI heard about a child with Asperger's syndrome who was given the test. She said all the inkblots looked like Paramecium. The psychiatrist didn't know what a Paramecium was, so he suggested she was psychotic due to her Paramecium "neologism". Later on, a different psychiatrist correctly diagnosed her with Asperger syndrome, she was obsessed with Paramecia.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYet another urban legend is revealed. A psychiatrist, a physician with more than a few hours of microbiology on his transcript, who didn't know what a paramecium was? Puhleeese! Besides, its psychologists who administer the Rorschach, not psychiatrists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt any rate, no diagnostician would rely on a single assessment tool, whether projective or objective, to arrive at a diagnosis. A battery of instruments and techniques are applied to the task of formulating a picture of a person's characteristic approach to his or her day-to-day life.