Searching for a Common Language to Talk About the Rorschach Within and Outside the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods

The Christian saying, “A couple that prays together stays together,” suggests that when couples pray together, they open a dialogue with a third entity (God) that allows the partners to increase their mutual understanding and intimacy. King and colleagues (2022) recently provided empirical support for this saying. In a 10-year longitudinal study with 371 families, they found that couples with higher levels of religiosity engaged in more joint activities over time. Shared beliefs, common wishes, and similar values improved couples’ functioning, and increased the quality of their relationship. In the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods (ISR) we all revere the Rorschach, and our common beliefs are around the value of “facilitate[ing] scientific exchanges among specialists, practitioners and researchers in the field” (ISR bylaws, Article 1). But what kind of “common praying” should the ISR do to “stay together”? What would help the subgroups within our larger group understand each other? What would help the ISR to increase cohesion internally and improve its impact externally?

Historically, cohesion has been considered the most important variable in groups (Lott & Lott, 1965), and – even though its definition has been controversial – a comprehensive meta-analysis stressed that both social cohesion (e.g., hanging out at gala dinners in congresses) and task cohesion (e.g., working together to improve the quality of the services the ISR provides for its members) are fundamental for a group to effectively tackle its challenges (Chiocchio & Essiembre, 2009).

Since 2021, the current editorial board decided to promote cohesion in the ISR by offering its members occasions for “thinking together” about the Rorschach. My hope is that this issue of Rorschachiana will also represent an occasion to promote community dialogue on the Rorschach. Community dialogue has been defined as “an interactive, community-based planning process that brings together participants from different sections of a community and encourages them to think about, discuss and explore underlying issues of concern” (Bernstein & Isaac, 2021, p. 2). Community dialogue fosters community engagement in socially relevant issues, improves common understanding of problems, and has a positive impact on people’s sense of connection, belonging, and trust in the group (DeTurk, 2006; Frantell et al., 2019).

Building community dialogue requires finding a common language to use in discourse. The 2021 special issue, dedicated to the centenary of the publication of Psychodiagnosis (Rorschach, 1921), aimed at promoting dialogue between members of the ISR and between the Rorschach community and the wider professional audience by providing updated reviews of research in specific fields of study and application of the Rorschach test (Carstairs, 2021), each commented on by experts in the field.

The goal proved to be ambitious, certainly successful but not without difficulties. On the one hand, it seems that “within” the Rorschach community, languages can be very different and may get in the way of promoting communication and mutual understanding. This was highlighted, for example, by the commentary of Meskanen and Pucci (2021) to Guinzbourg de Braude and colleagues’ article (2021) on the use of Rorschach with eating disorders. Meskanen and Pucci (2021) stressed that results using the CS and the French Rorschach approach are difficult integrate and synthesize. Similarly, different research methods used in Rorschach research can greatly complicate the task of summarizing and understanding research results. The commentary made by Andre van Graan (2021) on the paper on neurobiology (Jimura et al., 2021) highlighted how the variety of methods used to inspect the neurobiological correlates of the test makes it harder today, if not impossible, to accumulate research and replicate findings across studies. Finally, perspectives of Rorschach users of the qualities of the test may sound overly positive to the larger professional community. For example, the commentary of Hopwood and colleagues (2021), based on the demanding criteria of psychotherapy research, “toned down” the perhaps overly positive conclusions of Aschieri and Pascarella (2021) with regard to the quality of the Rorschach as a measure of psychotherapy outcome. The unfortunate conclusion is: We, as Rorschach users, are not very capable of talking with each other, and when we open up a dialogue with professionals from other fields, we may find that it is not easy to attune to external standards of research quality.

The current issue, originally envisioned by Sadegh Nashat and myself, is an effort to advance a common language to talk about the Rorschach both with Rorschach users and with non-Rorschach users in two ways. The first, is by offering the first keynote speech of the Geneva Congress by Robert Bornstein in the form of an Invited Keynote Address (Bornstein, 2022). The author provides a detailed and encompassing response to the crucial question, “What is the Rorschach test?,” and describes the impact that Rorschach-based science can have on psychodiagnosis and on the field of psychology at large. The second is by focusing the issue, through three articles, on “New insights from other psychological disciplines for Rorschach users.”

The first article, written by Meyer and Friston (2022) represents a ground-breaking application of the Bayesian model of the mind to the Rorschach test. The other two articles from Christman (2022) and Capelli and colleagues (2022) deal, respectively, with the impact of the lateralization process on Rorschach responses, and with the psychological functions and processes connected to skin contact in children and adults.

Meyer and Friston’s (2022) paper brings a breath of fresh air to the task of answering the question: “Why is the Rorschach test useful?” As an answer, their paper includes a short and clear summary of more than a decade of neurobiology studies that advocate for the brain’s active role in shaping perception to minimize the difference between the expected and actual sensory input. The most basic function of the brain, in this perspective, is to recursively (1) predict the environment and the sensations it should provide, (2) record the sensations received from the environment, (3) act to sample further if the “categorization” is accurate, and (4) update the prediction of the environment if the action signals back that the environment did not fit with the prior expectations. More “sophisticated” functions include the anticipation of future mismatch between actual and expected input depending on different courses of action. The Rorschach test, in this framework, is probably the best possible way to “picture” what each person thinks (anticipates) of their environment and what each person does (in Rorschach terms – what each person projects or attributes to the stimulus or behaves or performs – depending on the system used) to adapt to the “environment” represented by the card. According to the authors, the Rorschach test “provides an unprecedented tool to explore the landscape of a subject’s prior beliefs about the causes of their sensations. In one sense, Rorschach’s task is the ultimate tool for disclosing prior beliefs” (Meyer & Friston, 2022, p. 138), as “Rorschach recognized the task, while one of perception, also helped show the iterative cycle of prediction, error correction, active search, revised prediction, further error correction, further action, and so on” (p. 139). The authors detail how various features of the test coding and response processes, such as movement, ideation, and form distortion, can be illuminated by this perspective, and – most notably – how the recent translation of Hermann Rorschach’s book (Rorschach, 1921/2021) showed clear overlaps in the understanding of these phenomena between Rorschach himself and the “Bayesian” view of the mind.

This article should interest psychoanalytic Rorschach users as it gives a new and empirically supported meaning to the concept of “projection” onto the cards. Similarly, could the Bayesian concepts of active anticipation and of action be effective ways to “translate” concepts of transference to the assessor and of projective identification? Clinicians interested in therapeutic and collaborative assessment are also potentially interested in this manuscript, due to the implications this view of the mind has on what “therapy” should be. For example, if the Rorschach helps us understand what clients expect regarding problematic emotional states, then the Rorschach extended inquiry (Fantini et al., 2022) can be used both to highlight those expectations and to aid clients’ Bayesian brain to adjust expectations based on “here and now” sensorial feedback in the assessor–client relationship. This view further supports the well-known importance of the assessor’s active role in disconfirming the client’s pathogenetic expectations based on their previous negative relational experiences – and showed by the testing – during a therapeutic or collaborative assessment.

Christman’s paper (2022) is a powerful reminder of how much we still do not know about the Rorschach. While a few recent studies on adults ruled out the existence of significant Rorschach differences connected to age, gender, and ethnicity (Meyer et al., 2015), it is surprising to discover the potential for biased interpretations of the test results depending on other factors such as the hemispheric dominance. My hope is that this paper will revive an exciting field of study for Rorschach users: Does hemispheric dominance impact differently Rorschach results? If significant differences were found, would they imply the need for specific norms depending on the outcome of the lateralization process and the stability versus nonstability of hemispheric dominance? This paper is also of the utmost importance for all forensic psychologists, who may want to include in their reports that their test interpretations are mindful of the clients’ hemisphere dominance.

Capelli and colleagues (2022) offer a summary of the psychological functions that are organized around the skin contact in children and adults. Through skin contact, for example, caregivers actively contribute to their infants’ sense of body ownership and self–other differentiation; improve children’s emotional regulation; promote cognitive abilities such as sustained attention, object exploration, and delay of gratification; and improve brain maturation and the overall healthy development of the child. Since Anzieu’s conceptualization of “skin ego” (1989), Rorschach users proposed the test as a useful tool to infer the quality of the internalized representations of contact. Unfortunately, the research background to these inferences is not as solid as the empirical correlates of the skin contact with early and mature caregivers appearing in Capelli and colleagues’ paper (2022). Instead, Fisher and Cleveland (1958) developed the Barrier and Penetration (BP) scoring system in the Rorschach as a means to reliably and objectively measure respondents’ body image and the quality of body boundaries. The authors (Fisher & Cleveland, 1968) assumed that:

Barrier responses include images in which “emphasis [is] on the definite structure, substance, and surface qualities of boundaries” (O’Neill, 2005, p. 162). Penetration responses include images featured by “weakness, lack of substance, and penetrability” (ibid).

O’Neill (2005) summarized the main findings of more than 100 studies on BP focusing on coding reliability (excellent for both dimensions), temporal stability (very high), gender differences, age differences, and validity. In general, women tend to have more Barrier (8 responses vs. 7) and less Penetration (2 responses vs. 3) responses than men. Less consistent results emerge when considering the effect of age on Barrier and Penetration responses, which in some cases seems to be positively correlated (Fisher, 1986), while other studies found more Barrier and Penetration responses in younger respondents than in protocols from adults and older adults (Hayslip et al., 1997).

In terms of validity, Fisher and Cleveland (1968) concluded their summary of the first 15 years of research on this scale that BP responses have distinct correlation patterns: Barrier scores are generally predictable and consistent, while Penetration scores are valid only when measured with “extreme” groups of respondents. This finding limited the research on Penetration scores, and most of the subsequent studies focused on Barrier responses. O’Neill’s review (2005) of BP research concluded that:

The study by Capelli and colleagues (2022) provides an updated conceptual background to sustain the importance of touch as the basis of a healthy psychological development. BP scores – to date – appear to be an interesting coding system for linking empirical connections between these concepts and the Rorschach. In particular, the first goal would be to complete a systematic literature review on BP. Second, BP coding categories should be refined to avoid overlaps with other established codes, such as MOR contents (O’Neill, 2005). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, BP responses should also include other features beside the actual content, such as form quality and other special scores that may impact their interpretation. As suggested by various manuals of Rorschach interpretation (Exner, 2003; Meyer et al., 2011) clinicians should not limit the interpretation of Texture response to their raw number, but also evaluate their quality (i.e., a “hard rock” would necessarily be interpreted differently from “soft fur”).

Back to this volume, I believe that human existence “is not in minds but in meetings” (Cissna & Anderson, 2002, p. 17), and so I hope readers of this issue will find the desire to increase occasions for sharing and discussing topics such as, “What the Rorschach test is,” and about how to use it at its best. Hopefully, this approach will provide our Society with a meeting space both to keep informed about the latest topics of our interest, and also to promote creativity and cohesion within the community.