ABSTRACT
Rorschach wrote in his book that only occasionally does the content of the responses offer indications about “the contents of the psyche,” but he cautioned that conclusions from such indications should be drawn only after a consideration of the psychogram, the over-all findings, and the attitude of the testee in giving the relevant responses. By “contents of the psyche” he refers to the testee’s interests. This is shown in his illustrations of an engineer repeatedly seeing parts of machinery or a housewife dress patterns. 1 The conclusions he draws from such content in conjunction with the over-all picture refer to the degree of energy the person invests in his work, the amount of pleasure he gets from it, and the degree of his adaptability to working conditions; they refer to the dynamics of the person’s relation to his work rather than merely to the fact that he does work of the particular kind indicated by the responses. He goes on to emphasize that responses referring to unconscious contents deriving from repressed, emotionally charged complexes are strikingly rare and that his test is not suitable to explore the unconscious. 2 In his 1922 case study he modified this position somewhat and dealt rather extensively with the relation of the test findings to the unconscious of the patient. In doing so, however, his interest was focused not so much on content interpretation as such as on the problem which types of responses are likely to refer to unconscious or dynamically central problems of the testee and which are not. His answer to this question concerns mainly the relation of the various determinants to the functions of consciousness and to the unconscious. The form responses represent the conscious functions; the M, especially the specific quality of the movement perceived, come closest to central, unconscious attitudes; the C and CF he considers closer to the unconscious than the F. He also makes the point that unique responses and genuinely original ones tell us more about psychoanalytically significant material (namely, individual strivings and preoccupations) than do popular ones. Finally, he makes the observation that the F responses do not always exclude material deriving from unconscious complexes, and that whether they do or not depends on the degree of repressiveness of the person and on the temporary variations of repressiveness. 3 Thus, in Rorschach’s thinking, content interpretation is always closely linked to the specific perceptual quality of the response as well as the total configuration of the test record. There are good reasons for not using specific content outside of this linkage for interpretation. 4
