Eric Zillmer

I think the easiest way to do it is to see how the information has been processed and integrated. Does the person take the whole blot into consideration, or are they really interested in details? By the way, one blot response doesn't really mean anything, but if there's a pattern that the subject is really more comfortable isolating details, then it's probably a person who's more comfortable with the trees and not with the forest. I don't think that person should be put in charge of a nuclear reactor or National Security. Conversely, it could be good if someone is interested in integrating everything, but you want to make sure that the information they attempt to integrate is appropriate. So a good response to a complicated card, like Card 10, could be "This is Independence Day in France, this is the Eiffel Tower, with fireworks,'Vive La France'!" This response is something that integrates every aspect into an abstraction. A poor response when an individual is trying to integrate the image but it makes little sense. I had a patient who was a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology and went to New Guinea to work on his dissertation, not to return for two or three years and his advisor was wondering what happened to him. They finally brought him back and we tested him. His response to card 2 was that it looked like a bear, which it does, and the map of France, which it does, dancing together. But a bear and a map of France can't dance! He demonstrated what we call "slippage" in his thinking and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia.

These are stationary blots, but if a subject can superimpose movement that person is usually very bright. Often individuals may see humans compared to people who don't see any humans, or just fragmented humans, or just animals, which is a very easy response that often is given by children and adolescents. Basically the two basic criteria for looking at the Rorschach results is integration of information, and then to see if other people see what you saw. And that's just a frequency response, not a question of whether it's really there.

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