The Man Who Killed Apartheid by Harris Dousemetzis

Author:Harris Dousemetzis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781431428489
Publisher: Jacana Media
Published: 2018-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Dr Lambley did in fact give Tsafendas’s results to other clinicians to rate blind. He said, ‘No one said he was schizophrenic or even severely disturbed. They noted that in some instances, his sub-test results showed an extremely high level of intellectual functioning.’64

Van Zyl then spoke about the Rorschach Personality Test, ‘a series of ten standardized ink blots which is shown to the patient’. He testified that on the Rorschach Test, Tsafendas ‘showed some typical signs of schizophrenia’ and that he had ‘very poor human contact’. Van Zyl said, ‘He showed me eyes where I could not possibly see eyes and a nose and a mouth which were just not there.’ This seemed to amuse Judge Beyers. ‘Modern paintings?’ he enquired, to dutiful smiles around the court.

Fifty years after the trial, in 2016, Van Zyl was given several of the statements taken by the police from people who knew Tsafendas. Upon reading them, he acknowledged that their opinions were diametrically opposed to his diagnosis of 1966, adding that his diagnosis would have been different if he had seen them at the time. He said, ‘Yes. Look, obviously that is important information, and information that influences one’s findings in the end. There is no doubt about it.’65

Dr Lambley described Van Zyl as inexperienced at the time and not formally trained in the Rorschach Test procedure. He said Van Zyl ‘could not formally score an ink blot protocol, his grasp of psychotic signs was superficial, and he was unfamiliar with the research literature pertaining to Rorschach scores and schizophrenia, then, as now, still in its infancy. Examination of Tsafendas’s responses and the interpretations given in court demonstrated clearly that the testers were inexperienced.’66 Van Zyl himself admitted in 2016 that he was indeed inexperienced and not fully acquainted with the Rorschach literature and some of the other tests he performed on Tsafendas and that he was better with the Thematic Apperception Test.67

According to Professor Alban Burke, ‘Back in those days, the psychological tests were very unsophisticated. So you could have results and it could have been argued one of two ways, to say it proves or disproves. It was never an exact science. Whether the interpretation was right or wrong, the Rorschach ink blot test was never a scientific tool, it was mainly a projective test ...The fact is that those tests and the interpretation of those tests, were always open to interpretation ... The test could, at most, say that there is a possibility of schizophrenia, at the very most, but you could never make an accurate diagnosis. There are people who would argue that you could, but you could never make an accurate diagnosis of schizophrenia based on that test, or on any test for that matter.’68

Van Zyl also testified, like the psychiatrists, that he ‘got the impression’ that Tsafendas was ‘vague in thinking and difficult to communicate with at a personal level. I felt that he was in a world of his own. In his talk, he was circumstantial and often went off the point.

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