Searls shows persuasively how the creation and reinvention of inkblots has reflected psychologists’ scientific and cultural...
A history of 20th-century psychology focused on the life, work, and legacy of the inventor of the inkblot test.
Translator, essayist, and fiction writer Searls (What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, 2009, etc.) became fascinated by the “rich and strange” set of inkblots that, he discovered, are still used for psychological assessment. His investigation into the life of their creator, Swiss physician Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922), led to a trove of material collected by a biographer who died before he could write his book; along with other material, that archive informs Searls’ richly detailed, sensitive biography of Rorschach’s short life and long afterlife. A student of Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung, Rorschach was trained at a time when “an orgy of testing” dominated psychology. The son of an artist, with artistic talent himself, Rorschach was alert to modernist art movements, which shaped his ideas about the power of visual images to reveal personality and the power of culture to shape perception. He worked assiduously to craft precisely the symmetrical, mysterious, suggestive images that comprise his test, and he devised “a single psychological system” of evaluation that considered the viewer’s response to Movement, Color, and Form. Although he admitted that “it is always daring to draw conclusions about the way a person experiences life from the results of an experiment,” when he compared his evaluations of patients against other doctors’ diagnoses, he was encouraged about his accuracy. As Searls admits, Rorschach never convincingly explained how and why the inkblots worked. Unfortunately, his system, and the permutations that followed as generations of psychologists attempted to standardize it, proves difficult to follow in the author’s otherwise engrossing narrative. Searls is stronger when characterizing the “feuds and backbiting” that the test inspired among practitioners in America, where it “was a lightning rod from the start,” and Europe, where, for example, it was applied to assess Nazis on trial at Nuremberg.
Searls shows persuasively how the creation and reinvention of inkblots has reflected psychologists’ scientific and cultural perspectives.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3654-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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