Rorschach Ink Blot Personality Test Essay

The Rorschach inkblot personality test was developed by Hermann Rorschach, a psychiatrist from Zurich, Switzerland in the early 1920s (Exner, 2003, p. 3). He died at the age of 37, seven months after Psycho diagnostick, was published. He derived this test from the children’s game of Blotto, also known as Klecksgraphie, which uses words and story association from images blotted onto white cards (Exner, 2003, p. 6).
The test includes his ten selected inkblots, clinical findings, and theoretical bases for his investigations. These blots consist of inkblot designs printed on the center of a block of white cardboard. Each piece has its distinctive characteristics. Rorschach is superlative “when an understanding of a person, as an individual, becomes important for the purpose of selecting treatment strategies or targets, or when that sort of information is important to other decisions concerning the individual” (Exner, 2003, p. 4). Rorschach never considered his work to be fully complete.

He claimed high significance between the responses of psychopaths who took the test, which he “interpreted as indicative of underlying narcissism” (Wood, et al., 2010, p. 336). He came up with a far way better organized coding system for responses of the Rorschach which came to be known as Exner’s Comprehensive System. Later after his translations of codes, the Rorschach Research was established for better understanding of personality responses of inkblots, training of psychologists to administer and read the scoring, and to keep the measurement and methods up to date (Hertz, 1992, p. 168). Therapy, forensic study, prison inmates, and graduate trainees studying psychopathology are few areas where supporters have continued to test its methods (Wood, et al., 2010, p.