Very nice tirade, Stephen! :-) My response to Rikki's story was much the same. Anomalies in the drawing might indicate some disordered perceptual processing that would be symptomatic of epilepsy, much as the one-sided drawings of clock faces are symptomatic of unilateral neglect.
In these cases, the characteristics of the drawings (as a sort of behavioral output) are interpretable as symptoms. Not so of the stories people tell about ink blots (or the stories the therapists tell about the stories!) Claudia -----Original Message----- From: sbl...@ubishops.ca [mailto:sbl...@ubishops.ca] Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2009 9:47 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re: [tips] Wikipedia despoils the Rorschach On 29 Jul 2009 at 10:55, rikikoe...@aol.com wrote: > Many years ago, when I worked in a psychiatric hospital for children, > two of my colleagues discussed some unusual features they had > observed in figure drawings that seemed to be associated with > temporal lobe epilepsy.<snip> In fact, he did have temporal lobe > seizures Despite my tirade (as accurately labeled by Bill Scott) against the Rorschach, I have no problem with Riki's story. I have no problem with any psychological test, good or bad, which collects objective data and tries to make transparent, face, or objective use of them to diagnose. What I have a problem with are projective tests, of which the Rorschach is the prime offender. If Riki's colleagues were dedicated projectivists, they would not take whatever unusual features they saw in the child's drawings as suggestive of epilepsy. They would have used these features to make up a fantastic story about how traumatic events buried in his unconscious, and undoubtedly caused by psychological abuse from his parents, were responsible. Epilepsy would be the last thing they would think of. There are anecdotes of another sort that would make your hair stand on end, concerning how practitioners of the psychoanalytic profession persistently ignored neurological symptoms of treatable disorders in favour of such harmful fairy tales. Patients suffered years of misery as a result. No, the problem is not using objective data from tests, but using it to invent fanciful tales, which the Rorschach does so well. The problem, as usual, begins with Freud, and as our resident Freud expert, Allen Esterson, will undoubtedly tell you, Freud is a fraud. So is the Rorschach. There, how's that for a tirade? Stephen ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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)
