The Rorschach test

The Rorschach test or Rorschach test is a projective psychodiagnostic technique and method created by Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922). It was first published in 1921 and achieved wide circulation not only among the psychoanalytic community but also in the community of psychotherapists and psychologists in general.

The technique is mainly used to assess personality. It consists of a series of 10 plates that present ink stains, which are characterized by their ambiguity and lack of structure. The images have a bilateral symmetry, which comes from the way they were originally constructed: folding a sheet of paper in half, with an inkblot in the middle. By deploying them again, H. Rorschach found very suggestive percepts that gave rise, due to their non-figurative nature, to multiple responses. The psychologist asks the subject to say what the images he sees in the spots could be, like when one identifies things in clouds or embers. Based on their answers, the specialist can establish or contrast hypotheses about the psychological functioning of the person examined.