Outline for Chapter
Outline for Chapter:
From Cult to Icon: The Rorschach Comes to America
Why the Rorschach Was Appealing in the 1930s
The demands of clinical practice.
The bareness of existing clinical assessment approaches.
Need to gain a deeper, broader understanding of their patients.
Margarita Hertz quote
“The Whole Man” Bleuler quote
Psychoanalysis
The Projective Hypothesis.
Academic resistance in the 1930s
Describe it.
Background: the experience with intelligence testing
The “psychometric tradition”: Key concepts (give a table)
Norms
Standardization of administration and scoring
Scoring reliability
Test-retest reliability
Validity (group studies, statistical analysis)
Skepticism about “clinical validation,” which they called “subjective validation”
Had left them with a well-formulated body of theory about what constitutes a good psychological test, what kind of evidence is needed to establish its adequacy. And a hard-nosed skepticism about tests that failed to meet these criteria. Also, there was a certain hucksterism (Goodenough?)
Given this background, its understandable that psychologists in unversities were inclined to view the Rorschach enthusiasts as a “cult”
Clubbiness and enthusiasm
Acceptance of authority
Obsession with scoring
Failure to connect with broader knowledge base of psychology
Clinical validation and “blind analysis” (the problem of “hindsight bias”)
Claims far outstripped any scientific support. Broad claims based on little or no scientific evidence. Explained too much. Explaining too much: see quote from Jung about psychoanalysis explaining the rotation of the earth, p. 594 in Pichot’s article on Rorschach.
Resistance of Klopfer and his followers to the standards of the psychometric. Describe in next section.
Growth and Schism: The Rorschach in the Late 1930s
Bruno Klopfer: Charisma and Organization
Klopfer’s New Scoring Categories
(Mention Piotrowski here)
Klopfer’s Resistance to the Psychometric Approach
Global interpretations
Blind interpretations
Norms, numerical, quantification (mention that he never mastered stats)
Impractical or vague scoring rules (the double requirements of reliability and “coverage” or “correspondence”) (scoring rules for Form Quality)
Beck and Hertz
Publication of reliability and validity studies in respected journals, as well as research summaries.
Norms (Beck adults; Hertz for children; story of her loss of data)
Development of new categories (z scores)
The Schism between Beck and Klopfer
World War II
The Aftermath of World War II: Clinical Psychology Becomes a “Real Profession”
The acceptance of the test WITHOUT adequate scientific support, but based on the collective testimonials of so many well-respected clinicians. (clinical validation)
1. The Rorschach Cult
Mention, Emil Oberholzer, Hans Behn-Eschenburg and Georg Roemer Explain why they are not discussed at length in this article. Because (a) much of their work has not been translated into English, (b) the emphasis of the present book is on the Rorschach as it has evolved in the U.S., and (c) the influence of these European theorists was exerted indirectly, through their influence on Beck, Klopfer, Piotrowski, and the other systematizers in the United States.
See Bleuler’s quote about “the whole man”
One objection to this strategem is that the whole man is reflected in handwriting or responses to inkblots, and if the whole man is a very complex phenomenon, then the handwriting or inkblots must themselves be highly complex, a product of literally hundreds of interacting factors, so that the influence of any particular characteristic is likely to be weak and intermixed inextricably with
Second, the idea that “the whole man” is revealed in a particular product seems to overstate the integration of the different factors in a human being.
Third, why is it that *personality* should be revealed in handwriting or inkblot responses. Although a person’s history and innate abilities may affect handwriting, one would expect that some of the largest factors would be (a) schooling (perhaps a second grade teacher who forced practice).
Brief Introduction to the early systematizers
Beck
Piotrowski Elfish. Charming. Gracious. A polymath, broadly learned regarding experimental psychology, mathematics, history, and classical literature. Development of a computer interpretation program.
I think Exner (1969) discusses and gives example of computer program.
Published xxxx books and articles, on xxxx. Use Hertz’s tart quote (1959, p. 36) in which she tartly commented that Piotrowski’s book “is par excellence an exposition of his personal views, beliefs, and procedures” but “there is little evidence to indicate why he considers his procedure ‘scientific.’”
Klopfer. Phenomenalism, which is more closely related to philosophy than to the empirical scientific tradition that has dominated American psychology over the past century. Never really “got it” about statistical analyses. Opposed standardization.
Developed an extraordinarily complex system for scoring the test.
“smelled” the cards.
Jungian psychoanalyst.
Article on the psychological roots of cancer.
Robert Woodworth, the chair of the Psychology Department at Columbia, refused to let Klopfer offer offer a Rorschach course. Klopfer ended up teaching his course in Teacher’s College, which was at that time was roughly analogous to Columbia’s College of Education. Woodworth noted for his tolerance toward different views in psychology (see Hilgard, 1987, pp. 86-87, so it is perhaps significant that in this case he put down his foot. Could have also been because of his connections with Beck, whose dissertation he had supervised.
David Rapaport.
Hertz
2. The Evolution of the Rorschach Test [Introduction of New Scores]
3. History of The Psychometric Tradition
Cattell and his intelligence test. The issue of “validity”.
Special emphasis on Flo Goodenough’s story about Goddard’s version of the Binet-Simon [name?]. First talk about introduction of idea of norms, with mean and standard deviation. Then discuss how they began to discover various problems:
Inter-scorer reliability.
Test-retest problems
Internal consistency
Problems with Norms for older boys. Bad norms.
We will return to a striking re-appearance of this problem when we come to discuss the currently used version of the CS.
4. Basic Psychometric Concepts
5. The Rorschach’s Psychometric Troubles [Problems?]
5a.??? “Measuring the Whole Man”
Difference between psychologists and psychologists. Why this was relevant to the development of the test (i.e. Rorschach was naive about some of the principles of test construction that had been learned by psychologists over the preceding thirty years, and the shortcomings of the test would lead to endless criticism and conflict after the test was brought to America).
Give more details about Hertz and other systematizers
see how they fit into this tradition
The problem of scoring. The difficulty of developing a scoring system that is thorough enough to cover most ambiguities, but simple enough to be mastered and remembered by the scorer. Largely a practical problem.
5. “Clinical validation” versus validation. Seek and ye shall find. (1) An avidsearch for biographical information that confirms the Rorschach, and (2) the ability to elegantly explain away disconfirming evidence.
Get “Modern Medical Mistakes” for example of heart surgery that didn’t work.
Also, use NY Times example (August 15, 2001), re: surgery for emphysema that surgeons believe in, even though it appears to kill more people and doesn’t improve lung functions.
5a. “Experts” versus “novices”. Patronizing tone. Emphasizing status,
6. The Great Schism Between Klopfer and Beck
Development of new scoring (shading)
Development of new interpretations
Standardization
The issues seemed to be (a) conservative approach to Rorschach's original ideas; (b) attention to psychometric considerations (elimination of subjectivity -- Beck, Form Quality tables, Populars, norms, standardization).
I have read Beck's 1937 article and the rejoinders to it. He actually covers a variety of points, but probably the most notable are: (a) His insistence that scoring of F+ or F- (form quality) should be done as much as possible by objective, consistently applied rules that always score the same response in the same way; (b) His strong doubts about Binder's elaboration of the Shading categories, (c) Piotrowski's addition of m and FM as scoring categories, and (d) what he regards as a general proliferation of new scoring categories without an adequate scientific or clinical basis. [My comment: Beck was definitely pushing for a more objective, scientific approach to the Rorschach. The weakness of his position was that many of Rorschach's ideas lacked a firm scientific basis. Beck wanted to keep out unscientific or subjective additions to the Rorschach, but then adopted wholesale scores that had been approved or invented by Rorschach but still lacked scientific support. Thus, he was in the position of arguing from authority, implicitly placing heavy emphasis on Rorschach's authority. Similarly, he was right in principle about need for objective Form Quality tables, so that the same response would always be scored the same way. However, it's not clear he had such tables in 1937 -- even if he did, they could be questioned (just as his list of populars was questioned later by Harriman, 1945). The Klopferites, who did not endorse the idea of form quality tables or Populars based on empirically demonstrated statistical frequency, could take pot shots at Beck for his inadequate attempts to implement these ideas.
Shading.
The "Legend of the printer's error" is NOT found in the most prominent books on the Rorschach in the 1940s (Bochner & Halpern (1942, 1945; Klopfer & Kelley, 1946; Beck, 1944, 1945). Appears to have been introduced by Ellenberger (date) and Piotrowski (1957,xxxx).
Piotrowski and M
Reputation for talking a lot about scoring
Different methods of administration and scoring
Beck develops z-scores.
Be sure to include Harriman's (1945; 1946) two reviews of Beck's books. They are both quite negative in tone, and the second one (1946) is insulting. Harriman states (1946, p. 37) that Beck's theory is "a hodge-podge of speculation and dogmatism" and states that "though the experienced Rorschach investigator will read some of this material with benefit, the chapter disappoints the inquirer who can no longer be satisfied with mysticism, glib generalizations, and armchair theories." On page 39, "Beck has added little of value for the expert, and his procedures would be disastrous in the hands of one who would learn the method by self-study."
Harriman (1945) points out (quite rightly I think) that Volume I of Beck doesn't give adequate documentation or citations to explain how he arrived at his Form Quality tables.
Aside: Harriman's (1946, p.39) carries a great quote about how much experience contributes to understanding and interpreting Rorschach: "the interpretations of a beginner would inevitably be far removed frrom those of an experienced Rorschach worker."
7. The Rorschach and World War II
Group Rorschach
Need to sort out unfit applicants.
Intelligence testing had helped to screen out whose intellectual capacity was so low, also helped (???) to identify possible candidates for officer training.
Now need to screen out also those who might have psychological disorders or a tendency to such disorders.