ABSTRACT
“The Liver of a Respectable Statesman.” Hermann Rorschach’s first example of a “contaminated whole answer” is almost as amusing as it is bizarre. Indeed, if we guess that the respondent was a physician, and that he saw the liver as diseased, then we could almost imagine him as making an ironic joke, betraying his suspicions about statesmen in general. But, alas, this is not a joke but a kind of psychotic confusion—as would become readily clear if we asked the man, “which is which?” In general, contaminations are often so outrageously strange that they are difficult to forget.
