![]() Some psychologists who are dismissive of the Rorschach remind me of people stamping on the ground and shouting, "I'm normal! I'm normal! I'm normal!" I suspect that the most threatening thing about the Rorschach for many is that it threatens to expose the fact that "we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending. The Rorschach inkblot technique was a landmark in the history of personality assessment. Experienced administrators of the Rorschach learn that there is far more to people than the surface appearances. Inkblot techniques are considered to have an edge over other personality assessment devices in the sense that they provide rich and qualitative information about unconscious aspects of behavior. Taking the Rorschach often leads people down psychic avenues they prefer to avoid or disavow. There is something about the test itself, its ambiguity, the sometimes shocking black and red images, the detached and remote nature of the test-giver, that unsettles people. ![]() First, it is a misconception that the Rorschach is a test in which "anyone can see anything." There are normative responses to the Rorschach and there are idiosyncratic responses. I suspect that many psychologists are quite simply afraid of the test and what it has the potential to reveal. Popularly known as the 'picture interpretation technique,' it was developed by American psychologists Henry A. The Thematic Apperception Test, or TAT, is a type of projective test that involves describing ambiguous scenes to learn more about a person's emotions, motivations, and personality. If we keep probing, we might find yet another reason for the attempted abandonment of the Rorschach. Why the Thematic Apperception Test Is Used in Therapy. It's not an accident that many psychologists studying psychotherapy these days are focusing not on psychotherapy as it has been known for over a century, but on Artificial Intelligence, "scalability," and "gamification." In other words, something very modern and very technological but not anything remotely resembling the traditional way of doing things. They want the public to think of psychology the same way they think about the wizards of Silicon Valley. They hate when fellow airline passengers ask, "Are you analyzing me?" after they find out what they do for a living. They look at the inkblots and they see Sigmund Freud's swirling cigar smoke and Carl Jung's mystical towers. There are many psychologists these days who don't even feel comfortable calling themselves psychologists, preferring the term "cognitive scientist" instead. That is, the Rorschach smells faintly of what many contemporary psychologists regard as "the bad old days," the days when psychodynamic theory roamed the Earth, trampling everything in its path. But I think another reason that some wanted to drop the Rorschach is that it stinks.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |