ABSTRACT
There is no area of Rorschach analysis that has been more misused and more underused than content. For too many years Rorschach interpretation meant the interpretation of content, and so-called content analysis consisted of a poorly trained, beleaguered examiner who unsystematically offered his or her own associations to the patient’s responses and then regarded the personal associations as meaningful inferences. The resultant testing report would thus consist of a series of loose-fitting, internally inconsistent impressions, presented as facts, from which one could not disentangle the examiner’s preferences, values, and dynamics from those of the patient. Members of the academic and scientific communities, already distrustful of and antagonistic toward the Rorschach test, seized upon these practices and pronounced the instrument unreliable, invalid, and lacking in scientific respectability.
