The Invention of Creativity by Andreas Reckwitz

Author:Andreas Reckwitz [Reckwitz, Andreas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2017-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

5

The Psychological Turn in Creativity

From the Pathological Genius to the Normalization of the Self as Resource

5.1 The Inkblot Test

The first psychological creativity tests were performed unwittingly by Hermann Rorschach between 1911 and 1922 in the psychiatric clinics at Münsterlingen, Berne and Herisau. A physician and psychiatrist who was strongly interested in the new psychoanalysis and in avant-garde art, Rorschach was the first to use inkblots systematically for testing patients.1 Rorschach's inkblots were a set of ten randomly produced patterns with bilateral symmetry, including seven in black and three coloured. The inkblot forms can be interpreted in a variety of ways by patients invited to identify objects in them. Rorschach's third inkblot can be seen as a dancing dwarf with bloody feet or a doubled map of Antarctica. Inkblot eight could be the organs of a human torso with rats gnawing at the sides or a richly ornamented soup bowl. There are seemingly no limits to what can be imagined.

This sort of experimentation with inkblots was not Rorschach's invention. In 1857, Justinus Kerner published his little book Klecksographien, which introduced middle-class circles to the manipulation of inkblots as a parlour game.2 The point of such games was to find the most original and entertaining interpretations of the blots, which the participants generated themselves. Rorschach, whose book Psychodiagnostik (1921) was directed at a wide audience, was interested in something entirely different. He was trying to ascertain not his subjects’ originality but their degree of normality.3 Whatever Rorschach's intentions were, his introduction of the inkblot as a rigorous and replicable test method was a remarkable advance in the development of psychology. Since around 1900, psychology had been gaining cultural influence as a new intellectual technology, thanks not least to the development of methods for clinical, comparative testing of mental abilities.4 These tests were predominantly in standardized, written form and evaluated quantitatively. This approach was used, for example, for intelligence tests, which became widespread above all in the USA. Rorschach's test belonged in part to this psychological testing movement. Yet the openness of its results, which had to be determined qualitatively, made it significantly more individual than strictly standardized psychometric tests.

The aim of Rorschach's test was clearly stated. It was to be used in psychiatric clinics to distinguish ‘normal’ from ‘ill’ patients and to identify various illnesses. The evaluation was focused less on the contents of the patients’ interpretations, as was psychoanalysis, and more on their form, on the general pattern of perception to which the individual interpretation belonged. The remarkable thing about Rorschach's procedure was the absence of predetermined standards of normality. The standards had to be generated by the test itself. A psychologist carrying out the inkblot test does not give the person being tested statements or images which would dictate right and wrong answers but uses instead the randomly generated images to have the subject arrive at an interpretation which is a priori open. This method unwittingly revealed psychic normality as a matter of convention. The purpose of the test was to ascertain whether or not the subject was capable of producing ‘good forms’.

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