Despoilers of the Rorschach have been on the internet for many years. E.g. http://www.deltabravo.net/custody/rorschach.php
These folks didn't originally have all the disclaimers at the beginning of their site that they now have. While I fully agree with Stephen about the demonstrated lack of validity of the Rorschach, and I have been vocal about that opinion for decades, I must tell the following story which gives me pause. In the early 1980's I gave a tirade against the Rorschach something like Stephen's in a clinical case conference in a large hospital setting populated by a fairly large number of psychodynamically oriented practitioners. Afterwards, one of my more open-minded colleagues took me aside and informed me of a challenge that had been put out by Lloyd Silverman (RIP, 1986), a psychoanalyst in NYC. Silverman offered to read the Rorschach protocols of any client of any doubting physician and return an interpretation of the test that would be the virtual equivalent of the empirically derived MMPI results of the same client. We simply had to pay Silverman for the interpretation (I think it was something like $300 at the time), but he would provide a "double your money back" garauntee regarding its match to the MMPI (he was of course blind to the MMPI data). We decided to give him the test and provided him with a Rorschach protocol of a very complicated client who had a very complex set of statements that were generated by the MMPI. We didn't get our money back. Silverman's interpretation was very very similar to the MMPI results and in fact his predictions regarding the course of treatment for the client were better than those generated by the MMPI. Now, of course this is anecdotal, but it has tempered my thinking about the meaning of statistical tests of reliability and validity, particularly in the face of the objections that are made (particularly by supporters of tests like the Rorschach), that it depends upon in whose hands the test resides. It has also tempered my thinking about the results of the empirical tests of the efficacy of certain therapies when the execution of the therapies is handbook/template driven rather than executed by unrestrained artistic virtuosos of the type of therapy being examined. I know this kind of talk is the kind of maddening dismissals of science expressed by people who divine for water and help the police with psychic powers, but Silverman's performance impressed me. It is said that he never (perhaps rarely) had to pay on his Rorschach challenge. Bill Scott >>> <sbl...@ubishops.ca> 07/28/09 11:34 PM >>> Big brouhaha over the posting of Rorschach plates plus common responses to them on Wikipedia, the ethics of doing this, whether it ruins the scientific usefulness of the test, makes them meaningless, etc. You can read all about it in the New York Times at http://tinyurl.com/lblelt ("Has Wikipedia Created a Rorschach Cheat Sheet?"--Noam Cohen) But in all the anguish over this issue, no one seems to have asked "What scientific usefulness?" Or "How can something that is already meaningless be made more so by public disclosure? The fact is that the Rorschach is not science but pseudoscience and please, don't tell me about the Exner system. Our clever former fellow TIPSter, Scott Lilienfeld and his colleagues settled this back in 2000. Their language was cautious, but the message was clear: this is not science but junk. But unfortunately, pseudoscience never dies, and so the Rorschach is with us still. And still causing more damage (e.g. in child custody cases) than I'd care to contemplate. But no one who thinks psychology is a science should care a fig whether its plates and responses are public or not. Stephen The Scientific Status of Projective Techniques Psychological Science in the Public Interest Volume 1, Issue 2, Date: November 2000, Pages: 27-66 Scott O. Lilienfeld, James M. Wood, Howard N. Garb Free at http://tinyurl.com/l4cud5 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: sbl...@ubishops.ca 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Subscribe to discussion list (TIPS) for the teaching of psychology at http://flightline.highline.edu/sfrantz/tips/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu) --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly (bsouthe...@frostburg.edu)
