Word: inkblot
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...psychiatrists. About 40% of the applicants each year are rejected because of either the psychological tests or a past record of instability turned up in a background check. At the police academy, the new recruit takes the California Test of Mental Maturity, the Watson-Glaser Judgmental Test, a Rorschach inkblot test, a picture-memory test and the Thematic Apperception Test. At any time during his training or six-month probationary period, a recruit's superior may order him to appear before the psychiatric board, which may recommend his dismissal...
...same "wild" answer, often a proper name. Intrigued, Cramer has begun work on "auditory Rorschach tests," in which he deletes such large segments of the taped speech that whole syllables are missing. The subject must then reconstruct entire sentences, in an ambiguous context that closely parallels a Rorschach inkblot...
...avoid tipping off future test subjects, the two main sets of H.I.T. (Holtzman Inkblot Technique) patterns are not widely published. The two sets are interchangeable, and the second set is used for retesting a patient to gauge his progress through therapy. A third, unpublished set of 45 cards, used for explaining the method, gives an intimate glimpse of the technique...
...what a subject sees, or thinks he sees, in a given blot depends on the same basic principle that underlies the Rorschach: that what seem, superficially, to be chance associations actually reveal a subject's emotional makeup and deep unconscious aspects of his personality. Because most of the inkblot patterns are as symmetrical as animals or as human beings themselves, most test subjects are likely to spot anatomical images-bosoms, buttocks and even more frankly sexual symbols-where the lines converge in mid-blot. It is up to the tester to judge how far removed from reality a subject...
...have little to worry about. But the interpretation, "A fat cannibal king with two pregnant women," says Holtzman, "is rich with hostility toward women." A schizophrenic response: "Those things on the side look like charred tree trunks-only they're pregnant." A single offbeat response to a single inkblot, says Dr. Holtzman. "leaves the psychologist up in the air. You may have a guy who suppresses Charles Addams tendencies under a peaceful exterior, or he may really be a peaceful little guy who has a Charles Addams imagination. And that isn't bad. Because our technique relies...