Subjectivity in Motion

Life, Art, and Movement in the Work of Hermann Rorschach

Naamah Akavia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136273971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Forensic Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The motif of human movement has long been understood as central to Hermann Rorschach's strikingly innovative inkblot experiment. But owing to Rorschach's untimely death a year after publishing his famous work, Psychodiagnostics, the world has lacked an adequate understanding of how he came to put so much stress on human movement in his unique perceptual theory. Now historian Naamah Akavia changes that with her illuminating study of the intellectual and clinical development of this Swiss pioneer. Based on new archival researches and an unprecedented appreciation for Rorschach's milieu and his times, Subjectivity in Motion: Life, Art, and Movement in the Work of Hermann Rorschach is destined to become an instant classic in the history of psychology and psychiatry—and an important new contribution to our understanding of how movement figures in modernity generally. The historian will appreciate the intricate analysis of Rorschach's engagement with a wide variety of figures and movements ranging from Mourly Vold and Freud to Jung and Eugen Bleuler, from schizophrenia to Russian Futurism and Eurhythmics, from the word association experiment to the works of Alfred Kulbin and Ferdinand Hodler. But it is the psychologist who will benefit most profoundly from this richly detailed exploration, for the topic of human movement, how it is perceived, and how that figures in personality generally will never quite look the same again.

1Introduction

An introductory chapter ought to explain a book’s title at the very least. This book is meant as an historical investigation into the work of Hermann Rorschach (1884–1922), the Swiss psychiatrist known today for his eponymous inkblot test. Yet, as my title suggests, the principal focus will be on the specific motif of movement as it figured in Rorschach’s own psychological theory and psychiatric praxis, and as it was theorized by clinicians, scientists, and artists in the first quarter of the twentieth century. In this introductory chapter, I want to explain that choice of focus and to survey the ground of the ensuing exploration.

Initially, I will be investigating movement as it enters into responses on the “Rorschach test” together with Rorschach’s own creative and multi-valent understanding of those responses. And here I need to put non-psychologist readers on alert: It is precisely this aspect of the inkblot experiment—its ability to elicit the so-called “movement response”—that constitutes the most distinctive feature of Rorschach’s conception of what the experiment is all about. In the chapters that follow I shall be discussing Rorshcach’s conceptualization of movement from a variety of standpoints including: Rorschach’s own highly idiosyncratic experience of kinaesthesia; the experimental and theoretical milieu in which his conception of movement evolved; and the impact of his professional experience on the further elaboration of his concepts of movement as a psychiatric and psychological topic. Finally, in the lattermost portions of the book, while still placing Rorschach in the foreground, I will go still further and provide a more expansive cultural background to his understanding of movement. As part of that larger contextualization, I will attempt to draw some conclusions about his and his contemporaries’ interest in movement that go well beyond the biographical. But all these developments within the text derive from, and trace back to, the fundamental conundrum posited at the outset: How is it that a subject attributes movement to a static inkblot?

A few biographical details are in order before we get started. Hermann Rorschach was born in Zurich, on November 8, 1884, and grew up in Schaffhausen. It was originally his intention to study natural science, but after the death of his father, a drawing teacher, he decided to pursue medicine. Rorschach studied in Neuenburg, Zurich, Berne, and Berlin, completing his studies and qualifying in 1910. The same year he married a Russian colleague, Olga Stempelin. Following that, he became a resident psychiatrist, first in the mental asylum at Münsterlingen, then at Münsingen. In 1913 he accepted a position in a private sanatorium near Moscow, but returned to Switzerland after just one year. From June 1914 to November 1915 he was a resident at the psychiatric clinic at Berne-Waldau, after which time he became the associate director at the mental asylum in Herisau. While still holding that position he died, on April 2, 1922, at the age of 37, due to complications of appendicitis. His untimely and unexpected death had the consequence that he never had the opportunity to explain in detail how he arrived at his inkblot experiment and at the unique conception of movement responses which are essential in the experiment’s interpretation. As a result, there was always a slight air of mystery surrounding the inkblots, and it was decades before their underlying rationale became a subject of further experimentation.

In investigating the topic of movement, and in contextualizing Rorschach’s endeavor generally, this book will rely extensively on previously unpublished archival material from the Rorschach Archives in Berne. In organizing the results of these archival researches for this book, I have adopted a fan-like or radial structure. I take what has become commonly known as the “Rorschach Test” as my starting point, and gradually expand the scope of the investigation to encompass ever broader frames of reference. As we shall see, a detailed historical examination of the “Rorschach Test” and its origins readily reveals it to have been a much richer conceptual tool originally than the standardized projective test it has since become.

This raises an initial terminological dilemma. The procedure of presenting subjects with inkblot plates and eliciting their interpretations is commonly referred to in today’s psychological literature as the “Rorschach Test.” Rorschach, however, reserved the German term Test exclusively to refer to the technical and material aspects of his procedure, e.g., when alluding to the inkblot plates themselves. Apart from this limited usage, however, when he was talking about the interpretive action that these material objects evoked in the subject, and especially when he was addressing the theoretical and epistemological facets of the perceptual processes that underlay subjects’ responses, Rorschach employed the terms Experiment or Versuch—terms that imply much greater open-endedness than the more practical and applicative notion of Test.

Writing about Rorschach’s procedure from today’s perspective, while attempting to place his work in the context of its time, thus demands a basic terminological decision. In order to stress the meaning that the process of interpreting chance-forms (inkblots) had for its initiator, I have chosen to follow Rorschach’s own terminological policy throughout this book, using the term “experiment” whenever possible, and referring to the “Rorschach Test” only in a colloquial manner. This decision is in accordance with my intention to embed Rorschach’s inkblot experiment within his clinical and theoretical work more generally, and to situate it historically and culturally both vis-à-vis the local Swiss milieu and in relation to the more encompassing spheres of early twentieth-century European thought.

The broadening of interpretive scope will occur only gradually. In the early chapters, I will examine the inkblot experiment chiefly in relation to psychological experimentation conducted in laboratory and clinical environments. In addition, Rorschach’s notions of movement will also be investigated against the background of the theoretical interpretations and practical realities of the newly coined disease entity “schizophrenia,” and its important subtype, “catatonia.” Subsequently, in the later portions of this book, the motif of motion will be analyzed with regard to its representation in the visual and performance art of the period, a topic that Rorschach himself addressed in both his published and unpublished writings.

My ultimate hope is that investigating the element of movement in Rorschach’s work can serve to open a new and potentially fruitful perspective from which to inaugurate an approach to the widespread artistic and intellectual preoccupation with motion in fin-de-siècle Europe. But here let me say before proceeding further that the virtue of my starting point is due not to Rorschach’s possessing a simple and clear formulation of movement as a psychological phenomenon, but rather to the opaque, ambiguous, and tension-filled nature of his conception; for it was in these respects, in fact, that his conception was indeed emblematic of his contemporaries’ approach to motion and dynamism. Movement in this historical period consistently appears as an elusive element, one that was difficult to capture in either a concrete or a metaphorical sense. As a psychological notion, it was associated with both psyche and soma, and it often times served to mediate between motion and emotion; moreover, movement was deemed capable of being transmuted into energy, with energy itself often conceived as a condensed form of potential movement.

The elusive and over-determined nature of the interrelated notions of dynamism, motion, and movement did not constitute a new phenomenon in the history of Western culture; however, its specific configuration at the turn of the twentieth century manifests some distinctly modern characteristics. While a complete analysis of movement as it figures in modernity obviously exceeds the scope of this book, my study of Rorschach’s work aims to yield some preliminary insight into the widespread fascination with movement among his contemporaries, at least in regard to those realms that were in direct interaction with Rorschach’s theory and practice.

In general, turn-of-the-century European attention to the motif of human movement in the physical and psychical realms was often predicated upon an internal conflict between its constituent elements. Movement was interpreted in terms of a struggle located between the polarities of control and freedom, with the need to regulate or inhibit movement balanced against the wish to set it free in authentic and creative expression. Rorschach’s conceptualization of movement was representative of his time in that it encapsulated the contradictions of this period, contradictions which in some cases were embodied by distinct and warring sides. It is this encapsulation that contributes to the multiply determined nature of Rorschach’s notion of movement; it is what makes it so difficult to grasp, but simultaneously renders it such an interesting object of study.

Hopefully, the investigation of Rorschach’s theory and praxis will allow us to advance on two levels: On the one hand, to delve more deeply into the history of psychiatry and medicine; and on the other, to draw more general conclusions with regard to the wider cultural-intellectual milieu. This dual aspect is made possible, in part, by Rorschach’s tendency, common to many of the psychiatrists and psychoanalysts of this period, to engage simultaneously in modest and in ambitious projects. These ranged from the practical treatment of patients, to the formulation of universal psychological theories, and finally to the proposal of grandiose and synthetic treatises on religion, culture, and art. Thus, while Rorschach spent most of his time caring for patients, a large portion of them schizophrenic, in psychiatric asylums, he was also engaged in experimental work centered on his inkblot experiment. This formed the basis for a theory of perception and experience, which he then applied broadly toward the analysis of various Swiss religious groups, the study of certain artistic schools, and most generally the diagnosis of modernity itself.

In the chapters that follow I articulate the radiating areas of historical interest implicated by an examination of Rorschach’s experiment and its employment of movement as a central interpretive motif. Chapter 2 addresses the topic of movement in Rorschach’s most famous, as well as his most opaque production —the inkblot experiment itself. Through a close reading of the text that formed the synopsis of, and thereafter the basis for, the experiment, Psychodiagnostics: Methodology and Results of a Perceptual-Diagnostic Experiment [Interpretation of Chance-forms] (1921), I present the theory underlying the experiment, provide examples of its practical employment by Rorschach himself, and elaborate the motif of movement therein.

The chapter will open with a presentation of the parameters that Rorschach proposed for analyzing the experimental subject’s interpretation of the inkblots: form, color, and movement. Next, I treat the quasi-typological notion of the Erlebnistypus, or “experience type,” which Rorschach defined in terms of the ratio between a subject’s color and movement responses. I show that his conception of the experience type was grounded in the first instance in a polar opposition and a productive tension between the tendencies of introversion and extratension. I then argue that the Erlebnistypus was predicated even more profoundly upon a dialectic between freedom and constraint vis-à-vis movement, which could be manifested physically in the possibility of bodily motion and psychologically in a potentially creative “flight of associations.”

Accordingly, after first introducing the basic parameters and ideas underlying Rorschach’s theory of “embodied perception” as it applied to the experiment, I shift my focus more intensively toward the element of movement therein. I depict the motif of movement as a complex and non-intuitive aspect of Rorschach’s theory of perceptual experience, and analyze it extensively as it was presented in Psychodiagnostics. Some of the questions I address here are: What does a “movement response” to a static inkblot actually mean? How is it identified by the experiment’s administrator? These problems are investigated by examining Rorschach’s text and examples, and by analyzing his correspondence with colleagues and critics in the short period between the publication of Psychodiagnostics and his sudden death. In the course of this analysis, two central topics are highlighted as underpinning Rorschach’s conceptualization of movement: The modern notion of “kinaesthesia” and the presupposition of an inverse relation between physical motility and psychic dynamism, between outward action and “inner life.”

These topics had occupied Rorschach for many years before he published Psychodiagnostics. In Chapter 2, I therefore trace the genealogy of Rorschach’s constitutive notions of movement by examining his doctoral dissertation on “reflex-hallucinations,” and then by comparing his work to studies of movement being conducted at the same time in adjoining disciplines such as experimental psychology and neurology. While I cannot provide a comprehensive historical analysis of the inception of the modern notion of “kinaesthesia” (or “movement perception”), I do briefly describe some of the ways in which experimental psychologists and clinicians grappled with this nebulous and essentially liminal kind of perception, before tentatively situating Rorschach within that frame of reference. To be sure, for Rorschach the concept of kinaesthesia was deeply personal, grounded in his own visceral experience and in his clinical interactions with severely disturbed patients. Thus, unlike experimental psychologists, who attempted to discover objective general laws governing perception, Rorschach, professionally based in a succession of asylums and psychiatric hospitals, focused on the individual characteristics of subjective experience as a way of exploring the interstices between psychic life and bodily dynamism. It was in Rorschach’s investigations of the phenomenology of individual experience that the concept of “kinaesthesia” came to play a key role, functioning as the mediating principle between psyche and soma.

The disciplinary, theoretical, and practical settings for Rorschach’s studies of movement are explored further in chapter 3, which addresses the emergence of Rorschach’s new and unique apparatus for appraising individuals’ perceptualexperiential dispositions via their response to inkblots. Here, as with the emergence of any new phenomenon, historiographic issues arise. In describing the genesis of the Rorschach experiment, the chapter necessarily grapples with the methodological challenge of representing novelty and change historically without resorting to a “narrative of influence.” In order to make sense of Rorschach’s innovation, I naturally outline the background against which it developed and from which it diverged in significant ways. But, I do not draw a linear narrative of ancestry; rather I present the conceptual toolbox available to Rorschach, and lay out its theoretical and practical backgrounds. These backgrounds, I argue, are indispensable for discussing and understanding the ways in which Rorschach drew from, appropriated, and synthesized the various resources at his disposal, while also significantly transforming them in order to produce his unique experiment.

The most immediate and crucial context for understanding Rorschach’s inkblot experiment involves the examination of some of the distinct features of contemporary Swiss psychiatry, as epitomized by the work conducted in the Burghölzli hospital in Zurich. The two central figures in this milieu were Eugen Bleuler, head of the Burghölzli and Rorschach’s teacher and mentor, and Carl Gustav Jung, for a time Bleuler’s senior assistant and the director of the word-association experiments that were carried out at the hospital in the first decade of the twentieth century. It was Bleuler’s psychological and psychiatric theories that formed the most important source from which Rorschach drew to develop his own ideas, and it was the word-association experiment that served as the formative backdrop to Rorschach’s own inkblot experiment. Thus in chapter 3 I place Rorschach’s inkblot experiment against the backdrop of the Burghölzli’s experimental culture, investigating the ways in which his own work conformed with and—more significantly—diverged from that of the Zurich school and its clinical-experimental conventions.

While the inkblot experiment proper emerged from the experimental culture of the Burghölzli, Rorschach’s notions of schizophrenia and movement also derived as much from the practical reality of the rural mental asylum as filtered through his own experiences and formulations and by his idiosyncratic reading of the current psychodynamic literature of his day. As I show in chapter 4, Rorschach’s conceptualizations of schizophrenia and catatonia constituted a highly original synthesis of various sources, and his views do not strictly adhere to any of those put forward by the authoritative psychodynamically oriented theorists of schizophrenia of that era: Bleuler, Freud, and Jung. In developing this argument, I compare Rorschach’s psychiatric work to that of some of his contemporaries, particularly those who, in their theories and practices, explicitly addressed the relationship between physical movement and psychical dynamics. Two notable, and implicitly contrasting, theories that will be discussed are Bleuler’s notion of schizophrenic “ambivalence,” which had borrowed from the realm of motor physiology and been modeled on the neuro-muscular mechanisms of movement, and Freud’s dream-theory and his psychoanalytic technique of “free” association, which Freud developed as a neurologist conducting treatment with patients who lay still on the couch.

Following this introduction to contemporaneous theories of schizophrenia and their hypothesized relation to psycho-physical dynamisms, the chapter focuses on an unpublished manuscript, which Rorschach composed intermittently between 1915 and 1919, devoted to the case of “Niehans.” In this case-history, Rorschach presents the illness of a schizophrenic patient, who shifted over the course of many years from a paranoid state to a catatonic one, and then back to a paranoid state. Rorschach examined this patient’s pathology in its specificity, but also reformulated it in more general terms. Interestingly, and rather counter-intuitively, Rorschach ultimately conceptualized the catatonic form of schizophrenia, ostensibly a state of extreme stasis, as manifesting an intense internal dynamism of “fettered movement.”

The end point of my analysis in chapter 4 is a detailed comparison that Rorschach himself made between the case of Niehans and Freud’s famous study of Schreber. Here I follow Rorschach’s lead and conduct my own comparative investigation of Niehans and Schreber, as I seek to ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Movement in the Inkblot Experiment
• 3 The Swiss Complex: Rorschach’s Inkblot Experiment and the Burghölzli
• 4 Movement in the Psychiatric Clinic: Between Catatonia and Paranoia
• 5 Movement in Art: The Birth of Modernity Out of the Spirit of Primitivism
• 6 Afterword
• Appendix to Chapter 5: “The Psychology of Futurism”
• References
• Index