You, revealed
With the creation, in 1921, of the Rorschach inkblot test, psychologists and researchers had at their disposal a tool that might offer access to the inner life or “secret self” of a subject: the projective test. A new exhibition at Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, “X-Rays of the Soul: Rorschach and the Projective Test,” tells the story of the triumphal rise, and periodic setbacks, of the projective test movement, and portrays the heady confidence that science could be used to extract and access the most human parts of human beings. As opposed to objective tests, which compare a subject’s responses with an accepted set of correct answers, the Rorschach test, and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), developed at Harvard in 1935, present subjects with ambiguous images or situations, and analyze their responses for clues to hidden emotions and mental states. Visitors to the exhibition are immediately confronted with a projection of a...