The Inkblots by Damion Searls

Author:Damion Searls
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2017-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

By the midforties, practically every American had a son, brother, or other loved one who had been given psychological testing in the draft; an increasing number had taken such tests themselves. Not surprisingly, it was just then that Freudian jargon—inferiority complex, repression, and so forth—exploded into popular culture, along with psychotherapy in general, and the inkblots.

In October 1946, millions would have seen “Personality Tests: Ink Blots Are Used to Learn How People’s Minds Work” in Life magazine, which in the late 1940s reached some 22.5 million readers, more than 20 percent of the entire adult and teenage US population. This article showed four “successful young New Yorkers” looking at inkblots—the Lawyer, the Executive, the Producer, and the Composer (future novelist Paul Bowles, as it happens)—along with Thomas M. Harris, “who gives a course at Harvard in adapting the Rorschach to job selection.” It accurately covered details like norms and scores: “Responses are judged not so much by their actual content as by how they compare with the responses in thousands of tests previously given….It belongs to a class of tests which is called projective.” Readers were gently invited to give it a try themselves.

They might then have put down their magazine and gone to see The Dark Mirror, an Oscar-winning film noir starring Olivia de Havilland in a dual role as a pair of identical twins. The movie opened with credits rolling over inkblots and finished, after dozens of mirrors, symmetrical wallpaper patterns, and face-to-face scenes, with “The End” superimposed over another ominous inkblot. The movie’s psychiatrist hero used the Rorschach test, a word association test, a polygraph, and other ultramodern methods to discover which twin had committed the murder, while falling in love with the good one. Universal Pictures considered using the universal picture of an inkblot in print ads for the film, but in the end they went with a literal dark mirror, framing two Olivia de Havillands and the scrawled word “Twins!”

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