The Subtle Landscape

  While out in Maine I went into a really neat gallery/used book store.  There were many volumes I tried to convince myself to buy, but in the end walked away with only two:  A Rorschach Workbook and Child Rorschach Responses – both published in the early ‘50s.

  Yep the images above are five of the ten official Rorschach Ink Blots. Aren’t they beautiful?  Luscious I’d have to say.  Whoops, did I just reveal something about the depths of my psyche?

  A brief investigation courtesy of Google showed that the Test is still given though probably not nearly as frequently as fifty years ago.  And that there is no dearth of skeptics.  I remember discussing Rorschach with an elderly psychologist a few years ago and found him to be defensive, but yet still an advocate.  He held that so much data had been amassed over the years that the normative boundaries could reasonably and clearly be defined.

  No matter what, administration of the test must be interesting, especially after the accumulation of considerable experience.  The subject’s response is called a “Performance” because “The Rorschach test is based upon the assumption that behavior is meaningful and that when a person is presented with unfamiliar, nonstructured material, he will behave in his own individual way”.  

  A subject is initially given a vague instruction such as: “People see all sorts of things in these ink blot pictures; now tell me what you see, what it might be for you, what it makes you think of.”  The examiner then begins to present the ten cards from a deck which is always stacked in exactly the same order.

  Once the subject begins (hopefully ) to expound, the examiner takes careful, precise, and detailed notes.  How long it takes to react to each card is recorded as well as how long it takes to complete a response. 

  Then, “An inquiry, following the performance proper, is conducted to obtain sufficient information so that a response can be scored correctly.”  The examiner asks just enough questions to determine: where on a particular blot something was seen; essential info regarding form, movement, color, and/or shading of each discrete perception per card; content clarification if needed.

  All of the above is scored using a complex system of annotation to “facilitate the analysis of the record as a whole”.  A bar graph is created with the ‘determinant’ categories – movement, color, shading etc.  across the x axis and frequency of related responses on the y axis.  The result is called a Psychograph.

  Location categories are tabulated by percentage: location responses of a specific sort, (whole card, large detail, small detail) are divided by total number of responses.  So if thirty total responses were given of which eight were takes on the whole image on a particular card, then that score would be 8/30 or 27%.  These figures are compared to the “expected” percentages.

  “Normal expectancy” is that 20-30% involve the whole card; 45-55% large details; 5-15% small details; and less than 10% a combination of large details, small details, and some portion of the white space.

  Content is given one of three denotations.  ‘Popular’ if typical; ‘Original’ if rare, but good with respect to form and content; and ‘Bizarre’ if very rare, nebulous, and conceptually deficient.

  The Handbook includes many sample responses for every category.  As one might expect, there is incredible range – soup to, uhm, nuts.  My favorite thus far (with consideration to the maintenance of a certain decorum in this space…) is from the ‘Content’ category for card #8 which is the upper right most above: “The pink is the evil which is slowly destroying the good in the World.  Evil is triumphing and destroying the good”.  Whoa.

  Child Responses covers ages two to ten with age group specific observations made in six month increments up to the age of six.  It is filled with an incredible amount of detail.

  For example at age five: the total number of responses is slightly fewer than the two preceding ages; 58% of responses include the whole card; “content categories shift again to a more mature group… animals, objects, humans.  First age plants and trees are not an outstanding category.”  Sex difference not marked at this age.  Colored cards are much preferred. “All the dark ones don’t look so good.”

  What’s a typical response to card #8 from a five year old girl?  “I don’t know what this is.  Another butterfly.  Or a piece of candy.”

  How could this not be fun with kids? “Results of the present investigation point clearly and unmistakably to the conclusion that many types of response which are considered pathological or at least suggestive of disturbance in the adult occur quite normatively and characteristically at certain ages in the child”.

  Yes, I suppose that one’s early, florid imagination is usually trimmed (like that dang lawn) by the demands of life.  First half of one anyhow.  Well to recall Shunryu Suzuki’s observation in Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few”.

  I don’t know about you, but I’m fixin’ to break out my butterfly net again pretty soon…

  OK, I’ve always told my kids to listen to the little voice in their heads to keep them out of trouble and on the right path etc.  Maybe that’s been bad advice.

  Last weekend I was listening to the “Speaking of Faith” radio program on NPR during which host Krista Tippitt listened to best selling author Eckhart Tolle recount a seminal experience.  While riding public transportation to his university he often was seated near a certain schizophrenic who was always engaged in animated two-part conversations with herself.

  His realization was that he was frequently, though more quietly (but not silently!), similarly engaged.  Aren’t we all? You know: “I’m a dope.  What should I do now? No, that’s never worked. He’s an idiot. She’s hot.  Get out of my way moron.  Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize you were blind”…

  Furthermore, as I’ve mentioned (way )above , Julian Jaynes, one time head of the psychology department at Princeton wrote an unbelievably well wrought and erudite argument to the effect that the human preconscious mind was characterized by what we’d now classify as (mostly) auditory hallucinations. 

  And that today, while we’ve added the layer of consciousness, there is still plenty of evidence – vestigial and otherwise – of our ancestral selves.  In fact, it is exactly those vestiges that must be left behind to make way for behavior of a higher order. 

  “… athletic trainers… urge their trainees not to think so much about what they are doing. The Zen exercise of learning archery is extremely explicit on this, advising the archer not to think of himself as drawing the bow and releasing the arrow, but releasing himself from the bow and releasing the arrow, but releasing himself from the consciousness of what he is doing by letting the bow stretch itself and the arrow release itself from the fingers at the proper time.”

  Just think of the number of times you’ve gotten yourself in a stew and made it worse by continuing to stir.  Your mind takes over and you find yourself its captive.  You identify its interpretation of an event based upon sketchy sensory input.  Often later to have been found faulty or incomplete. 

  Michael A. Singer gives this advice: “The best way to free yourself from this incessant chatter is to step back and view it objectively… If you’re hearing it talk, it’s obviously not you.  You are the one who hears the voice.  You are the one who notices that it’s talking.”

  So, uh, notice what’s going on in your head.  Wait for it to go away.

  (And write home from time to time)

  In the Science Times section of the Jun 3, 2008 NYT there was an interesting series of predictions given by futurist Ray Kurzweil.  He has a decent track record and now posits that: solar power will be economical in ten years; soon there will be a drug that will let you eat whatever you want, and by 2050 “humans and/or machines [will] start evolving into immortal beings with ever-improving software”.

  Most interestingly, he predicts that by 2020 or so, with new tools including nanotechnology, gene sequencing, and brain scans etc, we will be “adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves”.

  Another interesting fellow, V. S. Ramachandran does not agree.  He is a neuroscientist with impressive range having done research and written fascinating books about phantom limbs and consciousness; is (or was) on the board of directors of the San Diego Museum of Art in La Jolla; and lectured widely about art, perception, and the brain.  (Including at the National Council for Education of Ceramic Arts!)

  Ramachandran allows that a thinking feeling machine might one day be possible, but not a reverse engineered brain.  “My colleague Francis Crick used to say that God is a hacker, not an engineer.  You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.”

  I agree with Dr. Ramachandran. Think about it.  An immortal man/robot hybrid would not have thoughts about sex or death and since the primordial soup, evolution of life on the planet has been guided by pursuit of the former and avoidance of the latter.  Still is: look at any billboard.

  Furthermore, it’s the incredibly inscrutable array of connections and cross connections that has led to the invention of the wheel, penicillin, thermos bottles, crepes suzette, the push-up bra, and everything else.  Even experts can’t account for all the stuff they come up with. 

  For example, Irvin Yalom begins his book Existential Psychotherapy with an anecdote about a cooking class in which he and several friends had enrolled.  After repeated failures at home, he went back to the school to watch again. 

  He hadn’t originally noticed that the chef did more than simply follow a recipe.  She would taste, readjust, and even incorporate afterthoughts.  Thus, before even beginning to really convey his thoughts about existential psychodynamics, he admitted that while “Formal texts, journal articles, and lectures portray therapy as precise and systematic, … and a careful rational program… I believe deeply that when no one is looking, the therapist throws in the “real thing”.

  (BTW, the book is really interesting and his selection of cookware provocative:   “The existential position emphasizes a different kind of basic conflict: neither a conflict with suppressed instinctual strivings nor one with internalized significant adults, but instead a conflict that flows from the individual’s confrontation with the givens of existence… Death – Freedom – Existential Isolation – Meaninglessness. )

  Or to come at it from an entirely different perspective: in the June 21 edition of the Wall Street Journal, billionaire financier George Soros credited his success to his backaches.  “I would say that I basically have survived by recognizing my mistakes.  I very often used to get backaches due to the fact that I was wrong.  When I make the right decision, the backache goes away.

  As a final example of the irreplicability  of the gray matter in our skull I’m reminded of an issue of the New Yorker a few years back.  In it were an interview with Bill Gates and an article by Oliver Sacks about Temple Grandin, the autistic veterinarian who says she feels like an “anthropologist on Mars”.  It was impossible to read the two pieces and not recognize characteristics and mannerisms of each in the other.

  Like it or not, we’re dang complex.  Maybe unfigureoutable.