The Rorschach

The Rorschach
Author: Martin Leichtman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1134886063

Martin Leichtman's The Rorschach is a work of stunning originality that takes as its point of departure a circumstance that has long confounded Rorschach examiners. Attempts to use the Rorschach with young children yield results that are inconsistent if not comical. What, after all, does one make of a protocol when the child treats a card like a frisbee or confidently detects "piadigats" and "red foombas"? A far more consequential problem facing examiners of adults and children alike concerns the very nature of the Rorschach test. Despite voluminous literature establishing the personality correlates of particular Rorschach scores, neither Hermann Rorschach nor his intellectual descendants have provided an adequate explanation of precisely what the subject is being asked to do. Is the Rorschach a test of imagination? Of perception? Of projection? In point of fact, Leichtman argues, the two problems are intimately related. To appreciate the stages through which children gradually master the Rorschach in its standard form is to discover the nature of the test itself. Integrating his developmental analysis with an illuminating discussion of the extensive literature on test administration, scoring, and interpretation, Leichtman arrives at a new understanding of the Rorschach as a test of representation and creativity. This finding, in turn, leads to an intriguing reconceptualization of all projective tests that clarifies their relationships to more objective measures of ability.

The Inkblots

The Inkblots
Author: Damion Searls
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 583
Release: 2017-02-23
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1471130436

SUNDAY TIMES 'BOOKS OF THE YEAR': 'the book develops into a bigger biography of the strange set of images [Rorschach] bequeathed, taking in everything from the origins of abstract art to the invention of the idea of empathy' – James McConnachie, Sunday Times IRISH INDEPENDENT 'BOOKS OF THE YEAR' The captivating, untold story of Hermann Rorschach and his famous inkblot test, which has shaped our view of human personality and become a fixture in popular culture. In 1917, working alone in a remote Swiss asylum, psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach devised an experiment to probe the human mind. He had come to believe that who we are is less a matter of what we say, as Freud thought, than what we see. Rorschach himself was a talented illustrator, and his test, a set of ten carefully designed inkblots, quickly made its way to America, where it took on a life of its own. Co-opted by the military after Pearl Harbor, Rorschach’s test was a fixture at the Nuremberg trials and in the jungles of Vietnam. It became an advertising staple, a cliché in Hollywood and journalism, and an inspiration to everyone from Andy Warhol to Jay-Z. The test was also taken by millions of defendants, job applicants, parents in custody battles and people suffering from mental illness – or simply trying to understand themselves better. And it is still used today. Damion Searls draws on untranslated letters and diaries, and a cache of previously unknown interviews with Rorschach’s family, friends and colleagues, to tell the unlikely story of the test’s creation, its controversial reinvention and its remarkable endurance. Elegant and original, The Inkblots shines a light on the twentieth century’s most visionary synthesis of art and science.

Handbook of Clinical Assessment of Children and Adolescents

Handbook of Clinical Assessment of Children and Adolescents
Author: Clarice Kestenbaum
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 548
Release: 1992-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780814746288

This essential reference book is must reading for mental health professionals who assess and treat children and adolescents. Comprehensive, detailed, clearly written, and innovative, it presents the approaches of the leading clinicians in their fields.

What's Wrong With The Rorschach

What's Wrong With The Rorschach
Author: James M. Wood
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011-02-22
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9781118087121

Since its creation more than eighty years ago, the famous Rorschach inkblot test has become an icon of clinical psychology and popular culture. Administered over one million times world-wide each year, the Rorschach is used to assess personality and mental illness across a wide range of circumstances: child custody disputes, educational placement decisions, employment and termination proceedings, parole determinations, and even investigations of child abuse allegations. The test's enormous power shapes the lives of hundreds of thousands of people -- often without their knowledge. In the 1970s, this notoriously subjective test was supposedly systematized and improved. But is the Rorschach more than a modern variant on tea leaf reading? What's Wrong With the Rorschach? challenges the validity and utility of the Rorschach and explains why psychologists continue to judge people by their reactions to ink blots, in spite of a half century of largely negative scientific evidence. What's Wrong With the Rorschach? offers a provocative critique of one of the most widely applied and influential - and still intensely controversial - psychological tests in the world today. Surveying more than fifty years of clinical and scholarly research, the authors provide compelling scientific evidence that the Rorschach has relatively little value for diagnosing mental illness, assessing personality, predicting behavior, or uncovering sexual abuse or other trauma. In this highly engaging, novelistic account of the Rorschach's origins and history, the authors detail the wealth of scientific evidence that the test is of questionable utility for real-world decision making. What's Wrong With the Rorschach? presents a powerfully reasoned case against using the test in the courtroom or consulting room - and reveals the strong psychological, economic, and political forces that continue to support the Rorschach despite the research that has exposed its shortcomings and dangers. James M. Wood (El Paso, TX) is Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, at the University of Texas at El Paso. M. Teresa Nezworski (Dallas, TX) is Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Dallas. Scott O. Lilienfeld (Atlanta, GA) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta. Howard N. Garb (Pittsburgh, PA) is on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of Studying the Clinician: Judgement Research and Psychological Assessment.

Using Projective Methods with Children

Using Projective Methods with Children
Author: Steve Tuber
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2018-02-02
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1351216767

Nominated for a 2018 Gradiva Award for Best Book by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, Using Projective Methods with Children is an enhanced synthesis of Steve Tuber’s previously published research on the study of projective methods to assess the representations of self and others, as well as the actual interpersonal experiences children internalize in the form of these representations. Integrating conceptual and empirical work, with an emphasis on the Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM), the book offers unique, evidence-based information on the importance of assessing particular aspects of a child’s inner self. The studies cover a broad range of topics such as dreams, anxiety disorders, political oppression, homelessness, and multiculturalism, and each is supplemented with an analytical introduction. A section that discusses future areas of research is also included.

Exploring the Child's Personality

Exploring the Child's Personality
Author: Coulacoglou Carina
Publisher: Charles C Thomas Publisher
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2008
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0398085781

The objective of this book is to provide readers with a comprehensive account of the childOCOs personality. The book examines in detail significant personality dimensions from developmental, clinical and cross-cultural perspectives. The intricacies of personality are exposed by means of the Fairy Tale Test, an instrument that attempts to track the preconscious and unconscious processes that OC conspireOCO beneath the behavioral and overt manifestations of personality. ChildrenOCOs responses to the FTT questions are assessed both from a quantitative and a qualitative perspective. Twenty-nine personality variables are used to rate the broad range of personality characteristics. No other personality test assesses such a large number of personality parameters. The qualitative evaluation of responses includes the analysis of 14 defense mechanisms, the study of the nature of anxiety, family dynamics, and the examination of ego integration and ego strength. The unique quality of this book is the use of the FTT in the exploration of the childOCOs personality, using large samples of children derived from diverse cultures. Additional advantages of this book are the chapters which focus on the research into two significant personality traits: aggression and ambivalence and the chapter on the analysis of idiosyncratic responses; the latter offers valuable information in the classification of original responses into levels of psychopathology. While the FTT has taken significant steps towards becoming a valid and reliable instrument, studies of its psychometric properties are an ongoing process. The book also includes examples, case studies and appendices for further study and review."

Experiential Foundations of Rorschach's Test

Experiential Foundations of Rorschach's Test
Author: Ernest G. Schachtel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2013-04-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1135061203

Schachtel shared with his great contemporary David Rapaport the goal of scientifically reframing the psychoanalytic understanding of personality. Experiential Foundations of Rorschach's Test, first published in 1966, is in one sense Schachtel's extended dialogue with Rapaport (in the guise of Schachtel's interlocutor) about this ambitious task. In the course of his brilliant and lucid meditation on this topic, Schachtel attempted far more than the simple explication of particular test responses. His book contains, and should be read as, an entire theory of personality considered in terms of the ways in which one person may meaningfully and detectably differ from another.

Principles and Practice of Child Psychiatry

Principles and Practice of Child Psychiatry
Author: Stella Chess
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 506
Release: 2013-06-29
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1489921982

Stella Chess's many admirers throughout the world have long looked forward to the day when she would produce her own textbook of child psychiatry. They will not be disappointed in this thoughtful and per ceptive account of the principles and practices of the subject, written in collaboration with Dr. Hassibi. It has all the hallmarks we have come to recognize as distinctive of the Chess approach to child psychiatry-gentle yet subtle and penetrating, always appreciative of the feelings and concerns of both the children and their parents, well informed and critically aware of research findings but far from over awed by the contributions of science, and above all immensely practi cal. Anyone who wants to know how one of the world's outstanding clinicians appraises what child psychiatry has to offer could do no bet ter than to read this book. Child psychiatry differs from general psychiatry in being con cerned with a developing organism, and it is entirely appropriate that the book begins with an account of child development and of the prin cipal theories put forward to explain it. Chess and Hassibi recognize the importance of theory in organizing ideas and in suggesting expla nations, but they remain skeptical of how far existing theories do in fact account for the outstanding issues in development. They note the limitations of all theories in explaining how development takes place and why individual differences occur in the way they do.

The Rorschach Inkblot Test

The Rorschach Inkblot Test
Author: James Choca
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9781433812002

This book gives graduate students and professionals a solid understanding of how to integrate the science and clinical art of Rorschach interpretation when working with patients.