ABSTRACT
Rorschach does not discuss the experiential dimension in the context of the rationale of his test. He felt that the theoretical foundations of the test were, “for the most part, still quite incomplete.“ 1 He writes about them explicitly in the brief section on “Interpretation of the Figures as Perception“ and implicitly in the chapter on “Results“ in some of his observations and speculations on intelligence and on the experience type. 2 However, he considered as the most important result of his test the fact that it enables us to see how a person experiences. “We do not know his experiences: we do know the apparatus with which he receives experiences of subjective and objective nature and to which he subjects his experiences in assimilation of them.“ 3 This is possible only if the test data themselves furnish significant and illuminating samples of the person’s way of experiencing. Indeed, Rorschach’s view of what the test shows constitutes a challenge to make more explicit the experiential nature of the processes underlying the test data. Thus, Rorschach’s important observation that the extreme predominance, in the coartated and coartative types, of logical discipline is achieved only at the sacrifice of the capacity to experience fully 4 summarizes in one sentence what has been made more explicit in our discussion of openness toward or avoidance of the impact of the inkblots, of stringent repressiveness or looseness of repression, of play, of degrees and types of being in touch or out of touch with reality and with oneself, and of the significance of the physiognomic responses. The same problems are touched upon in Rorschach’s observation that intuitive responses are given almost exclusively by people who have a dilated experience type, in other words, by people in whom the highly conscious logical function has not led to atrophy of the full capacity for experience. 5 Rorschach believed that it is mainly the experience type, i.e., the relation of movement to color responses, that permits one to see how a person experiences and what represents the person’s basic experiential attitude. This belief deserves the serious attention and thought of every student of Rorschach’s method. While I have some question about his opinion that the importance of the experience type is based primarily on its representation of the relation of extratensive to introversive attitudes, the factors making up the experience type do constitute the core of the test and are of basic significance for the testee’s personality, i.e., for his way of approaching, experiencing, and reacting to the world. The reason for this lies in the fact that all the determinants, not just color and movement, play a direct or indirect role in the experience type, and that the determinants represent certain basic experiential-perceptual attitudes. The absolute and relative strength and specific quality of these attitudes and their relation to each other show basic aspects of the testee’s relation to self and world. In Rorschach’s work the experience type has two dimensions. One is the continuum from predominant introversiveness to predominant extratensiveness, represented by the relation of movement to color responses; the other the continuum from coartation to dilation, represented mainly by the relation of form to movement plus color responses. It is true that Rorschach mentions explicitly only the number of movement and color responses “and a few other factors“ when he discusses the coartation and dilation of the experience type. 6 But it is clear from his presentation as well as from clinical experience that the significance of the absolute number of M and C responses for the coartation-dilation dimension of the experience type lies mainly in the fact that this number shows implicitly something about the relation of M and C to F responses: Where M + C equals zero, it meant that all responses are form responses, since at the time Rorschach published his book (1921) the only determinants known to him were form, color, and movement. 7 This means that the coartation-dilation dimension of the experience type tells us something about the relation of the emotional capacity for experience (roughly represented by the M and C) to the conscious, critical, logical, intellectual functions (roughly represented by the form responses, especially the F +). The quality of this relation can enhance or stifle the person’s capacity for a full experience of reality. As Rorschach put it, “the coartated and … coartative types are distinguished by the extreme predominance of those factors which can be increased by direction of conscious attention to them …; these types are distinguished primarily by logical discipline. In achieving this discipline, however, introversive and extratensive features become atrophied; in other words, they sacrifice their ability to experience fully.“ 8 Rorschach thus was justified in assuming that the experience type pointed to factors of basic, diagnostic relevance. The relevance derives from the central position of the determinants in the test.
