The Encounter with the Unfamiliar

Some patients and some Rorschachers pay insufficient attention to the rich and variegated world of the Rorschach stimuli. The Rorschach stimuli have been either ignored or miscast as blank screens or receptive x-ray film, as unstructured or ambiguous, when they are best described as unfamiliar. Examiner unfamiliarity – in fact, ignorance about the stimuli – is unacceptable, since testing is an encounter between the known (what we know about the test stimuli) and the unknown (what we want to know about the patient’s personality). The more that is known about the stimuli, the more that is potentially knowable about the patient. Greater attention to the test stimuli may enrich the interpretive yield of the Comprehensive System, the use of which is the bedrock of reliable and valid Rorschach interpretation. Hoping to encourage more attention to the contribution of the stimulus factors to the response, I explore here various perceptual dimensions of the inkblots, occasionally illustrating them with clinical examples. Finally, I propose various “exercises” to heighten examiner familiarity with the “unfamiliar” Rorschach stimuli.