All in the mind’s eye

Everyone knows what the Rorschach tests are. Like Freudian slips, boycotts, quislings and platonic friendships, however, it was long ago forgotten that they had been named after an individual human being. Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss doctor and psychiatrist with curiosity about the visual arts, a contemporary of Freud and Jung. He created the tests in a book published in 1921, and a structure for evaluating patient responses to them before dying of appendicitis the following year.

Rorschach’s life has its interests, and certainly casts some unexpected light on the Europe of his time. His father wrote an artistic treatise which sounds extraordinarily like the Bauhaus writings of Paul Klee, decades later. Was there something circulating among Swiss artists that we don’t know about? Rorschach worked with some of the creators of psychiatric medicine, notably Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term ‘schizophrenia’, as well as having a lively interest in the theories of Freud and Jung.