Rorschach

Ministerial Meandering

Rorschach

It must be hard to have a surname that sounds as though you’re having trouble clearing your throat - Rorschach - ‘Bless you!’

But you all know old Hermann - he’s the guy who created the inkblot test in 1921.  He was a Swiss Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst who looked rather like Brad Pitt, and sadly died at the age of 37 of peritonitis, probably as a result of a ruptured appendix.

The inkblot test is the showing of a series of ten inkblots, which are individually symmetrical, to a subject, and asking him or her what they think of when they look at them.  I won’t go into the science of interpretation of the results, but would mention in passing, that this idea was also used by Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli.

The idea was used by Rorschach initially to try and discover if schizophrenics showed a particular tendency with the standard ten blots.  It is probably unlikely that it worked, but it came to be used more for determining personality traits.

I am not going to go down that particularly treacherous road, but only say that how we interpret things depends entirely on how we experience them.

For example, you have all heard that ‘one man’s meat is another man’s poison’.  That means that while one person may experience a set of circumstances as blissful, another may feel them to be purgatory.  This doesn’t stop with the menu choices - you enjoying your pickled eels, and me running to the bathroom at the sight of them.  I remember many times in northern Norway each year with the Royal Marines; some were entirely in their element, and lived for the winter deployments - they were usually qualified Mountain Leaders.  Others of us were tropical animals, whose brains froze at the mere thought of ice.

I have seen it happen in relationships too.  Again, you have all heard the rhyme, ‘Jack Spratt could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean - and so, between the two of them, they scraped the platter clean.’  That, of course, would be ideal situation, but life isn’t always like that.  Oil and water don’t mix - however hard or often you whisk the mixture into an emulsion - it will always eventually separate into its component parts.  That’s why the truism that ‘Opposites attract - but similars marry’, remains valid.

Not so long ago I was at a concert, sitting next to a person who was thoroughly enjoying each piece that was being played.  I was waiting for the end so I could go home.  This was just such an interpretation of an inkblot by two different people sharing the exact same experience.

I have also been watching episodes of ‘The Chosen’, which I believe is a helpful interpretation of Jesus’ earthly life.  But in the watching of it, I have been struck by how different members of Jesus’ early followers viewed his actions.  Some would try to push him to this course of action; others to a different path.  Or they would see his motives in different lights - even though he rarely, if ever, voiced them.

These too were ‘life-Rorschach’ tests, if you like.

So, just as it was difficult to determine motive or intent behind Jesus’ actions - before we had the wisdom of hindsight - so, also, it is dangerous and difficult to attribute too much to the way you or another looks at a pattern - be it of life or of art.  Inkblots are like that.

Philip+