F. Barton Evans Photo: Ted Wood

Fearful Symmetry

The Rorschach Inkblot Method, the iconic personality assessment that uses a dead man’s fountain pen spillage to plumb the psyche, is sometimes branded as pseudo-science, but it has a champion in F. Barton Evans, A72. Evans, a clinical and forensic psychologist in Bozeman, Montana, has performed more than 475 psychological evaluations for courts and served as an expert witness 61 times. He has used the Rorschach in personal-injury, child-custody, criminal, and immigration cases, and co-edited the Handbook of Forensic Rorschach Assessment. He calls the test “an elegant instrument” that in the right hands can help paint the fullest psychological profile of a person.

Its creator, the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, got the idea from a party game where guests passed around a smutch of ink and gave their creative interpretations. (His skill at the game earned him the German nickname Klex, or “Blot,” as a kid.) What would his schizophrenic patients at the asylum see, he wondered? As it turned out, something different from less-disturbed minds. Rorschach published his first results in 1921 but died a year later, at age 37.

When Evans first encountered the test—in graduate school at Rutgers University—he was put off by the absence of a “systematic, empirically grounded model.” But by the time he began using it in his private practice, in 1989, the test had been thoroughly overhauled. John Exner, a psychiatrist and professor at Long Island University, devised a system for giving and scoring the test that included more than 100 criteria, from how common the answers are, to what parts of the blots test-takers focused on, to whether they saw images in the ink parts or the blank white spaces. The responses are given numerical values and computed into, among other tabulations, a depression index, an egocentricity ratio, and a suicide constellation.

Still, there is something romantic about the test. It uses the same 10 images—five black and white, five with colored inks—that Rorschach used. (American Psychological Association guidelines prohibit their wide dispersal. To view them you need a degree in psychology—or the ability to use Google.) Something so quaint was just begging to be debunked, and a handful of academic psychologists tried to do just that when they published What’s Wrong with the Rorschach in 2003. They argued that it lacks accurate norms—or baseline scores from nonpatients—and that it overpathologizes. In one study of 123 subjects who had no psychiatric history, 16 percent scored in the abnormal range on the schizophrenia index.

Evans parries with studies that show the Rorschach’s validity is comparable to EKGs and MRIs, and is on par with psychological tests that measure similar personality traits. “The Rorschach is not only alive and well but very well used in the court and in forensic settings,” he says.

Some clinicians remain unpersuaded because no one knows exactly why the test works—why describing animals means something, seeing movement is revealing, and noting pairs of objects will elicit an “aha” from the test giver. Evans isn’t sure either. But he theorizes that who we are has a lot to do with the way we look at the world. “We live in a very complex environment, and we have a gazillion different stimuli we can focus on,” he says. “We carve out the world based on our personality, and Hermann Rorschach stumbled on a way of tapping into some of that.”

He finds the Rorschach particularly suited to court cases because it is difficult to fake. “It’s very hard to add something to the test that isn’t already in your head,” he says. Evans once assessed a man who had copied almost all of his Rorschach answers from a website that purported to coach people on how to get a healthy score. “He came out looking more disturbed, and in a different way, than he probably was,” Evans says.

Among his more dramatic witness-stand experiences was a child-custody case, where Evans used the Rorschach and other methods to assess the mother. “She ended up looking very disturbed—really impulsive, given to poor decision making,” Evans says.

The woman’s lawyers brought in a well-known Rorschach critic, who testified that not only was the Rorschach a useless test, but Evans had scored it wrong. (It reminded Evans of the old restaurant joke: “The food here is terrible—and such small portions.”) Not long after, the woman conspired to kill her ex-husband—arguably a poor decision—and is now serving 20 years for attempted murder.

Yet, Evans stresses, the test can’t determine whether someone committed a crime, and should be used alongside other techniques such as interviews, self-report tests, and case history reviews. “It’s very good at describing the underlying psychological propensities,” he says. “But you never use the Rorschach to make diagnosis. That’s not its strength.” It can tell you how a person deals with feelings, how he perceives other people, and whether his logic is faulty, but it can’t tell you he is schizophrenic.

After studying Rorschach cards for almost two decades, Evans has had plenty of time to settle on a favorite. Is it the one with the two waiters lifting the soup tureen? The one with the cello made out of star fruit?

He picks No. 9, a mix of red, orange, yellow, and green. “Some people find that card to be really dramatic,” he says. “There are a lot of very interesting color shadings. It is the hardest to interpret—it is the one that people halt at.” As if anyone couldn’t see it’s a pair of seahorses dancing around a mushroom cloud.

JULIE FLAHERTY is a senior health sciences writer in Tufts’ Office of Publications and the editor of Tufts Nutrition. She has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times.