ABSTRACT
The centennial of Hermann Rorschach’s birth was observed in 1984, and more than 85 years have passed since he began in earnest to show inkblots to patients being treated in the Krombach Mental Hospital in Herisau, Switzerland. His “psychological experiment,” which he called it, led to the publication in 1921 of his monograph, Psychodiagnostics: A Diagnostic Test Based on Perception (1921/1942), and eventually to the standardization of a personality assessment instrument that has been administered to hundreds of thousands of people, generated thousands of research studies, and become widely familiar to professional persons and the general public around the world. Despite its high visibility and broad recognition as an assessment technique, however, the Rorschach has not always been adequately conceptualized with respect to the kind of instrument it is and how its data can best be interpreted. Accordingly, this presentation of principles of Rorschach interpretation begins with two introductory chapters on basic considerations in Rorschach testing, one concerning the nature of the Rorschach as a measuring instrument and the other addressing approaches to Rorschach interpretation. The following five aspects of Rorschach assessment, each of which has received considerable attention in the literature, define the basic nature of this instrument:
1. Rorschachassessment is both anobjective anda subjectiveprocedure.
