The following lecture was delivered by David Klugman, MA, MS, LCSW, at The 21st Century Gallery in Nyack, NY, October, 2006

Technology aside, two major cultural events took place in the 20th century, both of which went in wrong directions as they entered and eventually found a place in our mainstream social consciousness.

The first of these was the Rorschach, and the second was the discovery made by the early abstract painters in America as they explored the transition from figuration into abstraction.

I. The Rorschach.

The basic premise of the Rorschach is something nearly everyone is familiar with – it is a household concept. Look at an inkblot, what do you see?  

While everyone knows that Rorschach was a psychiatrist, the lesser know fact is that he was also a painter. The reason this is an important detail is that it tells us that the inkblots he created were not nearly so random as they are often thought to be. Indeed there is good evidence to suggest that Rorshach did alot of “touching up” to make the inkblots “work.” In other words, the inkblots were not merely blots but paintings of a sort.

Rorschach discovered two very interesting and unexpected outcomes while conducting his experiments. The first was that everyone saw different things in his abstract blots; and the second was that what each viewer saw represented something important about who they were and what they were up against in their psychological life.

Being a psychologist in an era where there was still precious little in the way of psychological technology, Rorschach found his discovery was quickly taken up by other psychologists – especially psychoanalysts - and applied within the context of the paradigm of the day which was of course Cartesian.

By Cartesian here I mean to indicate a paradigm or way of thinking that demarcates self from world: the ghost in the machine as it is sometimes called.

Operationally the Cartesian paradigm works like this: there is a subjectivity “in here,” call it the self, and that self has a tendency to project its contents into the objective, unanimated world of things “out there.”

When this “world” is an inkblot, the projections of the self can be more isolated and therefore more easily studied. And this was a good thing for a number of reasons – chiefly because it helped people make sense of things that were otherwise nonsense.

Inevitably, however, the Cartesian based theory of projection still left the subject alienated from the world in which they lived. And so, while diagnosis by means of the Rorschach may lead to a certain understanding about the psychology of an individual, it does nothing to help teach the person that self and world are not separate and dichotomous, but co-extensive; that is, self-experience extends itself into what we might call world-experience, and this world-experience is the actual present tense context in which each person lives.

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