ABSTRACT
What does the testee experience when he encounters the inkblots in the test situation? It is not possible to know or describe the full experiential range of reactions occurring in people who take Rorschach’s test. At this point, I shall consider only the experiential dimension of some significant ways in which testees react to the encounter with the inkblots, emphasizing especially the reactions to the unfamiliar structure of the inkblots, to the quality of the unknown, and to the absence of rules and guideposts in the test situation. Actually, when analyzing the experiential quality of the encounter of the testee with an inkblot one can separate only artificially the subjective from the objective sides of this encounter, the testee’s reactions from the qualities of the inkblot. The ways in which the objects of the world, in this case a series of inkblots, are experienced by man depend on the manner of his approach: The richer, more many-sided, and open toward the world the perceiver is, the richer, more varied, and alive will be the object world he encounters. The object will reveal itself fully only to the person who turns to it fully, with all his sensibilities and capacities. Conversely, the person who represses much of his own inner reality equally has to shut out by selective inattention or other mechanisms of avoidance those aspects of reality outside him which might touch on that which he represses. The person whose sensibilities have been starved and impoverished is no longer able to see the full range of the world accessible to man. Thus, man and his world cannot ever be separated, but can be understood only in their interrelation. Man can experience the world only in his own, the human, ways; this is as true of his scientific attempts to understand or manipulate the world as it is, in a different way, of his immediate sensory experience.
