
Bear, Bat, or Tiny King? On the Rorschach Test - samclemens
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n21/deborah-friedell/bear-bat-or-tiny-king
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sdfin
It's tragic that in countries like Argentina this test, and many other
projective tests, test based in psychoanalitic pseudoscience and with lots of
evidence against them, are routinely used by therapists and taught in
universities. Another example of a commonly used projective tests is the HTP,
where you draw a human, a tree and a person and a they are interpreted
according to baseless dogmas.

If somebody wants to read details about results of research about the
Rorscharch and projective tests I recommend Lilienfeld's paper "The Scientific
Status of Projective Techniques". You can google it as a pdf.

And for a divulgational reading about the topic this article at Scientific
American is quite good
[http://digitalcommons.utep.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...](http://digitalcommons.utep.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=james_wood)

Fortunately in USA and Europe psychology has embraced science (or is very
willing to do that, I mean, even if the research cannot be always replied or
doesn't use the best methodology, the scientific method predominates). In
Argentina psychologists are mainly postmodernists, anti-science, attatched to
Lacan's revelations. Of course there are exceptions, but it's difficult to
uproot all the charlatans from the public universities and hospitals.

~~~
alskdfji
I have mixed feelings about what you're saying and about the article.

On the one hand, I completely empathize with what you're saying--it's
mystifying to me when I see practices continue when there's so much empirical
data about them to suggest they shouldn't be used. In the US less-well
validated procedures are on the wane, but they still appear in use from time
to time.

On the other hand, although I agree Lilienfeld's paper is excellent, buried in
it is the complicated truth that some projective tests do demonstrate evidence
of validity. There's also the tricky issue that a test is not just a stimulus
set, but a procedure, and even certain ways of the Rorschach have proven
useful empirically. But all these things have been forgotten or ridiculed
because of the current anti-projective zeitgeist. That is, certain
projectives, used in a certain way, are invalid, and it happens those have
been the most popular, but if you take another hard look at the data, it's not
true of projective tests in general.

The article provides a nice overview of the Rorschach, but the end is puzzling
to me. The MMPI is one of the best-validated behavioral measures in history,
and the examples are so misleading that I wonder about the author and Annie
Paul's motives. An item such as ‘My mother is (or was) a good woman’ isn't
interpreted in isolation, and even if it was interpreted in such a way, it has
predictive value in the same way as your social media history that so many
services are starting to scrape for prediction also. It's an interesting
article that ends on a note of incompetent ignorance.

