I'm glad to hear this is not about a testicular event.
This is interesting stuff and my comments are not meant to offend anyone. It is presented as trivia and somewhat hazy information from memory. I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist. There are many problems associated with pinning labels on individuals who suffer from psychological pain or disorder, and my post is not meant to cause harm to anyone, nor is it directed toward anyone in particular.
I'm looking at my old Psych 101 textbook from 1974 and this is what it says about the inkblot or Rorschach. First off, it is a projective or subjective test rather than an objective test. A projective approach is where the psychologist assumes that people would project themselves into the task given them, that they would "structure ambiguous stimuli according to the structures of their own basic personalities." The three projective tests are the Word Association Test, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), and the Inkblot Test (Rorschach.)
Regarding the inkblot test, the book states "no two psychologists will interpret test responses in quite the same way, and there are almost as many scoring techniques as there are people using the tests. It is sometimes said that Rorschach interpretations tell us more about the psychologist than they do about the person who took the test."
An objective test is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), perhaps the most widely used personality test in America today*(1974) and the exact opposite of the projective tests.
The text goes on to say that the MMPI is more reliable in predicting future behavior, but may not be as valid an index of personality structure as the inkblot test. So the MMPI is more reliable while the inkblot may be more valid. OK enough of the book.
I remember my psych prof discussing the inkblot test in class some 30 years ago. At the time, the inkblots were standardized and considered to be classified material. This was so as to obtain spontaneous reactions from the test participant. Of course with the Internet nowadays the inkblots are likely available to the public. One thing the prof said was that in his experience, it didn't matter so much what an inkblot looked like, but that when this test was given to mental patients in hospitals...Paranoid schizophrenics tended to focus in on minute details, i.e. if an inkblot looked like a bat (which is normal,) the schizophrenic would say he saw three men walking along a road with a tree. This image would be a small part of the whole inkblot located in one small area of the entire image.
According to the professor, from time to time a blank card with no inkblot was presented. This would produce high anxiety in a schizophrenic patient and was a situation they couldn't deal with. He said a schizophrenic patient would become very upset and either throw the card down in anger or become catatonic, unable to say anything or continue the test. This is all I remember, and he didn't go into much detail about the subject because it was a beginner level class.
Les
