Your social networking feeds are likely to be flooded with people’s take on the ink blots. Who knows? Perhaps you’ll find out a lot more about their personalities by the end of the day. (Cue sinister music) The test is used by psychologists to analyse a person’s personality traits and emotional functioning. It’s also used for detecting underlying thought disorders, especially when individuals are hesitant to talk about their thinking processes openly. You see the ink blot test used widely in movies most often involving grave psychologists who show them to deranged prisoners in fancy looking institutes. In Alan Moore’s Watchmen, one of the main characters calls himself Rorschach and wears a mask - which is really a white cloth covered in ink blots. According to
Wikipedia
, Hermann Rorschach was known to his school friends as Klecks, or “inkblot” since he enjoyed klecksography, the making of fanciful inkblot “pictures”. Unlike his classmates, however, Rorschach went on to make inkblots his life’s work. Later, it seems, the excitement in intellectual circles over psychoanalysis constantly reminded Rorschach of his childhood inkblots. Wondering why different people often saw entirely different things in the same inkblots, he began, while still a medical student, showing inkblots to schoolchildren and analyzing their responses. in 1921 he wrote his book Psychodiagnostik, which was to form the basis of the inkblot test. The inkblots were an overnight success due to the seemingly miraculous behaviour readings they provided. However, they were considered scientifically worthless by several psychologists.
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