Hermann Rorschach

Who was Hermann Rorschach?

Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, best known for developing a projective test known as the Rorschach inkblot test. This test was reportedly designed to reflect unconscious parts of the personality that "project" onto the stimuli. In the test, individuals are shown 10 inkblots - one at a time - and asked to report what objects or figures they see in each of them.

Rorschach was born in Zürich and spent his childhood and youth in Schaffhausen, in northern Switzerland. He became known to his high school friends as Klecks, or "inkblot" since, like many other young people in his native country, he enjoyed klecksography, the making of fanciful inkblot "pictures". Unlike his classmates, however, Rorschach would go on to make inkblots his life's work.

Like his father, an art teacher, Rorschach engaged in painting and drawing conventional pictures. As the time of his high school graduation approached, he could not decide between a career in art and one in science. He wrote a letter to the famous German biologist Ernst Haeckel asking his advice. The scientist suggested science, and Rorschach enrolled in medical school at the University of Zurich. Rorschach began learning Russian, and in 1906, while studying in Berlin, he went for a holiday in Russia. Rorschach graduated in medicine at Zurich in 1909 and at the same time became engaged to Olga Stempelin, a girl from Kazan in the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. At the end of 1913, after graduation, he married Stempelin, and the couple moved to live in Russia. A son was born in 1917, and a daughter in 1919.