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The captivating, untold story of Hermann Rorschach and his famous inkblot test, which has shaped our view of human personality and become a fixture in popular culture.

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SUNDAY TIMES ´BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017´: ´the book develops into a bigger biography of the strange set of images [Rorschach] bequeathed, taking in everything from the origins of abstract art to the invention of the idea of empathy´ James McConnachie, Sunday Times

IRISH INDEPENDENT ´BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017´

NEW YORK POST ´MOST THRILLING AND FASCINATING BOOKS OF 2017´: ´rich and engaging... Damion Searls did a phenomenal job ´

´Searls restores much of [the inkblot test´s] potency in this rich and resonant book . . . Even in the age of alternative facts, there are still right answers, and wrong ones, and the inkblots still ring true´ Sunday Times

´A marvelous book about how one man and his enigmatic test came to shape our collective imagination. The Rorschach test is a great subject and The Inkblots is worthy of it: beguiling, fascinating, and full of new discoveries every time you look.´ David Grann , author of The Lost City of Z and Killers of the Flower Moon

´It seems incredible that no one before Damion Searls has ever written a biography of Rorschach... His early death may have deterred other would-be biographers, but Searls sails past it with style: the second half of his book traces the fortunes of Rorschach´s famous test, which became a household word in America after World War II, when the U.S. Army used it on draftees. Searls uses this unlikely-seeming artifact to illuminate two histories, one scientific, the other cultural, both full of surprises.´ Lorin Stein, The Paris Review

´This excellent book begins as a biography and becomes, when [Rorschach] suddenly dies of a ruptured appendix at the age of thirty-seven, a cultural history of his creation.´ Harper´s

The captivating, untold story of Hermann Rorschach and his famous inkblot test, which has shaped our view of human personality and become a fixture in popular culture.
In 1917, working alone in a remote Swiss asylum, psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach devised an experiment to probe the human mind. He had come to believe that who we are is less a matter of what we say, as Freud thought, than what we see. Rorschach himself was a talented illustrator, and his test, a set of ten carefully designed inkblots, quickly made its way to America, where it took on a life of its own.
Co-opted by the military after Pearl Harbor, Rorschach´s test was a fixture at the Nuremberg trials and in the jungles of Vietnam. It became an advertising staple, a cliché in Hollywood and journalism, and an inspiration to everyone from Andy Warhol to Jay-Z. The test was also taken by millions of defendants, job applicants, parents in custody battles and people suffering from mental illness - or simply trying to understand themselves better. And it is still used today.
Damion Searls draws on untranslated letters and diaries, and a cache of previously unknown interviews with Rorschach´s family, friends and colleagues, to tell the unlikely story of the test´s creation, its controversial reinvention and its remarkable endurance. Elegant and original, The Inkblots shines a light on the twentieth century´s most visionary synthesis of art and science.

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