Psychodiagnostik – What Rorschach Did Not Anticipate in 1921

Years ago, when I was travelling around the world as a health care professional, I met a psychologist who told me that my keen interest in interpreting shapes seems to have very basic five determinants – past experience, color, smell, a short night sleep, and spicy food!

I still laugh about that psychoanalytic brilliance.

But, it is undeniable that I enjoy tremendously seeing what others may discard as unshapely or uninteresting. In fact, most of my artistic inclinations are toward the beauty of the slightly hidden messages people, animals and engrained shapes reserve for the careful eye and keen explorer.

In some way I search for that phenotype of beauty that is not immediately apparent.

… Ok, so I was preserving the hide of a cottontail rabbit. Winter hides are thicker on these small animals and I can paint on them without damaging. When the hide was dry, I looked at it and immediately I felt that it was looking back at me! Yes, there was a perfect eye that had formed during the salting process and now it was clearly looking at me, or at least at something.

While in 1921 Rorschach proposed 10 inkblots to assess in the diagnosis of schizophrenia, I am more impressed by Alfred Binet’s attempts to use inkblots to test creativity. And perhaps S.  Freud’s dream symbolism is the synthesis between Rorschach’s psychoanalytic backdrop and Binet’s simplification of how creativity may manifest itself.

No matter, this is what the cottontail rabbit hide looked like to my creative eye:

What did I see there?

Well, I immediately thought of Mongolia, Yaks and Yak herders. Without hesitation I saw a Yak looking to my left but somehow morphed into the Yak herder with the stereotypical Mongolian pointed leather hat. Man and beast had become one.

To delineate the line between the face and the hat, I added an Abert’s squirrel tail. The Abert is one of two native squirrels of Arizona. This tail is quite unique because its tip is not pointed but somehow bifurcated… I had kept it for a while wondering what will accommodate this unique tail. Of course it would be a Mongolian Yak, morphed into a Yak herder, in a phenotype that emerged from a preserved cottontail rabbit hide.

Simple.

Ok, now I needed to accentuate the leather/fur hat component so I added the tail of a hare en guise of ear flops. To further the humanization of the Yak, I painted a salt-and-pepper bear on its chin and gave the pointed hat some colour. Perfect.

But I needed a driving force to make this Yak and herder reach higher. Perhaps it was the shape of that naturally formed eye that made me think of vision. This yak was looking beyond the arid steppes of Mongolia!

So I drew a symbolic Yak on the elongation of the head. It gave both a feeling of sprinting forward and the force of the symbolic bull.

To pursue the idea of driving forward and sprinting, I took the opportunity to use pigeon wings I had preserved for a while. The bluish shades of the wing gave that feeling of detachment and elevation.

… I am not sure if I was affected by all the determinants proposed by the psychologist during the autumnal equinox in Oslo. But I know that no pigeon wings had ever taken a Mongolian Yak to such psychoanalytic heights!

October 24, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018