1884-1922

Swiss physician and psychiatrist who developed the inkblot test, now known as the Rorschach test, which is widely used for psychological evaluation and the diagnosis of psychopathology. His experiments, which began in 1918, involved asking patients to describe their subjective responses to a series of accidental inkblots. The results of hundreds of tests of patients and normal subjects were published in his Psychodiagnostics (1921). Rorschach concluded that he could distinguish his subjects in terms of their personality traits, emotional characteristics, perceptive abilities, impulses, and intelligence on the basis of their responses to these ambiguous stimuli.