Contemporary Perspectives on Rorschach Assessment

Abstract

Summary: In the last 20 years the advent of the Comprehensive System has developed the Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM) into a standardized and psychometrically sound personality assessment instrument with numerous indices that can be reliably coded, show considerable test-retest stability, and have abundant valid corollaries. Rorschach assessment has demonstrated utility in contributing to clinical diagnosis of psychopathology, providing guidelines for treatment planning and outcome evaluation, and identifying adaptive and maladaptive features of how people attend to their experience, use ideation, modulate affect, manage stress, view themselves, and relate to others. The RIM can also be effectively integrated with more structured self-report inventories in a complementary way that describes personality functioning in greater depth than would otherwise be possible. The RIM remains at present a widely used and extensively researched measure in many parts of the world. Although the inkblot method is essentially a culture-free instrument with universal applicability, further research is needed to establish cross-cultural normative data concerning its variables.

Protecting the integrity of Rorschach expert witnesses: A reply to Grove and Barden (1999) re: The admissibility of testimony under Daubert/Kumho analyses.

“…The RCS literature is replete with studies showing a positive correspondence between RCS variables and personality characteristics and behaviors (e.g., Bornstein, Hill, Robinson, Calabrese, & Bowers, 1996, on dependency 5 ; Burns & Viglione, 1996, 1997, on the RCS Human Experience variable; Meyer, 1999b, on the RCS Prognostic Rating Scale 6 ; Weiner, 1996, on the validity of the RCS; Weiner, 1999, on treatment planning and outcome assessment; and Gacono & Meloy, 1994, on aggressive and psychopathic personalities). This does not include the large body of literature that was used originally by Exner (1993) to develop the RCS or the many studies that he and his colleagues conducted in establishing nationally representative norms and testing relationships posited by the earlier Rorschach literature.…”

Moving Rorschach Scoring Forward

“…Horn and Mihura (2008) showed that especially instructions to, but also permission to, card turning have substantive impact on the response process and may lead to an increase in the number of reflections, especially landscape-type reflections. Card turning may be prompted by flexibility, curiosity, and autonomy as well as by being compulsive, but not necessarily by being self-centered (Weiner, 1999). Likewise, as also suggested by Horn and Mihura (2008), reflection responses may be viewed as one way of solving the challenge created by the symmetry of the blot.…”

Failure of Rorschach-Comprehensive-System-based testimony to be admissible under the Daubert-Joiner-Kumho standard.

“…In arguing that many RCS scores are valid, Ritzler et al (2002) also referred to unnamed scores ostensibly related to aggressive and psychopathic personality traits (Gacono & Meloy, 1994), other unnamed variables purportedly related to treatment planning and outcome assessment (Weiner, 1999), "the many studies" (p. 207) conducted by Exner (no references given), the "large body of literature that was used originally by Exner (1993) to develop the RCS" (no references given; pp. 206 -207), and Exner's "nationally representative norms" (p. 207).…”