ABSTRACT
The term “perceptanalysis” has been chosen to emphasize the essential feature of Rorschach’s experimental technique of personality investigation. The technique consists of eliciting percepts, or visual images, by making the subject give meaningful interpretations of ambiguous and indeterminate visual stimuli. These interpretations are a function both of the objective visual stimuli and of the meaning which the subject ascribes to them. The subject usually experiences these interpretations as a product of his imagination. Rorschach 1 * spoke of his inkblot test as “the interpretation of accidental forms, i.e., of non-specific forms.” † The logically essential point is not that the stimuli are accidental, ambiguous, or unstructured. The essential requirements are: (1) that the visual stimuli elicit a great number of varied percepts from different people looking at them; (2) that each individual produce a limited number of percepts; (3) that the sets of percepts vary from one individual to another to a maximum degree; (4) that the set or pattern of percepts of each individual vary in accordance with the changes in his personality, be these changes slow and gradual or rapid and marked; and (5) that the same formal aspects and the same material content of the percepts have the same connotation for everybody, that the same percept have the same meaning no matter by whom or when produced and be subordinate only to the principle of interdependence of components (cf. p. 390). Perceptanalysis is a method of personality investigation, the unique feature of which is that the inferences about a subject’s personality must be based solely on the analysis of the formal aspects and of the material content of the subject’s interpretations of ambiguous and indeterminate visual stimuli. It is more than a test. It is a way of reasoning.
