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WORK TITLE: The Inkblots
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://damionsearls.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
http://damionsearls.com/about.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Married; children: one.
EDUCATION:Attended Harvard University and University of California–Berkeley.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Literary translator and writer.
AWARDS:Awards from PEN America, PEN Center USA, the Netherland America Foundation, the University of California, and the governments of Austria, Belgium, and Netherlands; National Endowment for the Arts awards, 2006 and 2017; Guggenheim Fellowship, 2012; Leon Levy Biography Fellowship, 2013; Cullman Center Fellowship, 2014.
WRITINGS
Author of revision, Lend Me Your Character, Dubravka Ugresic, translated by Celia Hawkesworth and Michael Henry Heim, Dalkey Archive Press, 2005; author of preface, Tun-huang, Yasushi Inoue, translated by Jean Oda Moy, New York Review Books, 2010; author of foreword, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust: A Critical Study of Remembrance of Things Past, Howard Moss, Paul Dry Books, 2012.
SIDELIGHTS
Damion Searls is a writer and a translator of German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch literature. He has translated works by many celebrated modern writers, including Jon Fosse, Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Christa Wolf, Robert Walser, Alfred Doblin, Ingeborg Bachmann, Elfriede Jelinek, and Nescio. In addition to awards from PEN America, PEN Center USA, the Netherlands America Foundation, and the University of California, he has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship, and a Cullman Center Fellowship.
What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going
Searls’s debut story collection, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, contains five stories that explore “the exquisite indignities suffered by those with rich inner lives,” according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer. The protagonists of “56 Water Street” and “Goldenchain” are frustrated writers; “The Cubicles,” set in California, satirizes the dynamics of the dot-com frenzy. Each story is inspired by a particular work by a canonical writer. “The Cubicles” is a contemporary retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House,” while Vladimir Nabokov’s “A Guide to Berlin” is the model for “A Guide to San Francisco.” Yasuchi Inoue’s “Obasute” is the inspiration for Searls’s “Goldenchain;” Andre Gide’s novella “Marshlands” is reworked in “56 Water Street;” and Tommaso Landolfi’s “Dialogue of the Greater Systems” is the model for “Dialogue Between the Two Chief World Systems.”
Reviewers enjoyed the book’s writerly aspects, and the ways in which the collection connects the works of disparate authors. David O’Neill, writing in Artforum International, observed that Searls is “unfazed” by the influence of literary masters.
The Inkblots
The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing is a history of twentieth-century psychology. Searls frames this story through the life and achievements of Swiss physician Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922), inventor of the inkblot test. This test uses inkblot shapes printed on cards. The test subject is shown a card and asked what the shape might be. The tester records responses, which are then scored and analyzed. This test, named after Rorschach, became quite popular; by the middle of the twentieth century, it was routinely used not only in psychiatry but also in settings such as job interviews. But the test has not been without controversy, and though it has remained in use into the twenty-first century, its popularity has declined in an era of increasing focus on diversity, psychopharmacology, and interest in precise quantifiable measurements.
Rorschach did his medical training under Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung during an era when psychology was intensely focused on testing. But he also had an artistic background, and was fascinated by the ways in which visual images could shape culture and be used to study personality. To test his patients’ responses to images, Rorschach had to create pictures that were bilaterally symmetrical and indeterminate, but suggestive of something real. Gathering data from his patients’ responses, he then developed a way to score the test. He considered whether a person responded to the entire image or just a portion of it; whether the person focused on form, color, or both; and whether the person mentioned movement. Rorschach also counted the number of times a test-taker mentioned human, animal, and anatomical images, and how often a test-taker gave an indecisive answer–saying an image might be one thing or another, without preferring one.
Rorschach soon saw distinct patterns in these data. Certain responses were associated with bipolar depression; others with schizophrenic depression. For him and for many practitioners, the inkblot test became a useful diagnostic tool. The test became especially popular in the United States; according to Searls, the test works when properly administered and scored. “Our brains are more visual than verbal,” he writes. “It really does tap into something more primal and emotional.” The Inkblots was hailed as an informative book that, in the words of Library Journal reviewer E. James Leiberman, identifies “the benefits and costs of generalizing about the most complicated matter on Earth: the human mind.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Searls, Damion, The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing, Crown (New York, NY), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Artforum International, April, 2009, David O’Neill, review of What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, p. S4.
Booklist,February 15, 2017, Donna Chavez, review of The Inkblots, p. 21.
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2016, review of The Inkblots.
Library Journal, February 15, 2017, E. James Lieberman, review of The Inkblots, p. 102.
Maclean’s, March, 2017, Brian Bethune, review of The Inkblots, p. 66.
Publishers Weekly, March 30, 2009, review of What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, p. 31.
Publishers Weekly, January 30, 2017, review of The Inkblots, p. 194.
Reviewer’s Bookwatch, June, 2009, Margaret Lane, review of What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going.
Spectator, March 4, 2017, Philip Hensher, review of The Inkblots, p. 50.
ONLINE
Damion Searls Home Page, http://damionsearls.com (November 3, 2017).
Identity Theory, http://www.identitytheory.com/ (November 3, 2017), James Warner, review of What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going.
Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English. He is the author of a book on Hermann Rorschach and the Rorschach test, and has translated many classic modern writers, including Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Alfred Döblin, Jon Fosse, Elfriede Jelinek, and Nescio, edited a new abridged edition of Thoreau's Journal, and produced a lost work of Melville's.
Searls grew up in New York City, studied German philosophy at Harvard and American literature at UC Berkeley, and has received writing and translating awards from PEN America, PEN Center USA, the Netherland America Foundation, the University of California, and the Austrian, Belgian, and Dutch governments. He lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn.
His Googleganger, Damion Searls, co-wrote The Korean Electronics Industry, is on Facebook, and has patents. Patents!
He has had one chess game published in the newspaper.
AWARDS
2017 National Endowment for the Arts
2014 Cullman Center Fellowship
2013 Leon Levy Biography Fellowship
2012 Guggenheim Fellowship
2006 National Endowment for the Arts
CONTACT
Email: damion@damionsearls.com
Literary agent: Edward Orloff
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Painting: Danielle Peterson Searls, 2003, after Nicolas de Staël
Author photo: Paul Barbera
Website design: Deric Carner
All in the mind's eye: there may be something in the Rorschach tests, says Philip Hensher, but can it really be measured?
Philip Hensher
Spectator. 333.9836 (Mar. 4, 2017): p50.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, his Iconic Test and the Power of Seeing
by Damion Searls
Simon & Schuster, 20 [pounds sterling], pp.405
Everyone knows what the Rorschach tests are. Like Freudian slips, boycotts, quislings and platonic friendships, however, it was long ago forgotten that they had been named after an individual human being. Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss doctor and psychiatrist with curiosity about the visual arts, a contemporary of Freud and Jung. He created the tests in a book published in 1921, and a structure for evaluating patient responses to them before dying of appendicitis the following year.
Rorschach's life has its interests, and certainly casts some unexpected light on the Europe of his time. His father wrote an artistic treatise which sounds extraordinarily like the Bauhaus writings of Paul Klee, decades later. Was there something circulating among Swiss artists that we don't know about? Rorschach worked with some of the creators of psychiatric medicine, notably Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term 'schizophrenia', as well as having a lively interest in the theories of Freud and Jung.
The important point about Rorschach is that he was a practical clinician without the extravagant speculations that circled round both Freud and Jung. Readers of The Magic Mountain often come to the seances in the later part of the novel without realising that, for many writers on the mind, paranormal and subconscious activity might prove to be part of the same thing. Rorschach, on the other hand, had no interest in the paranormal. His concern, more promisingly, was with the links between aesthetic response and mental health, and he sought ways to comment on whether responses showed hidden neuroses or minds in good health. This, and other explorations into associations of ideas in patients, produced the famous tests.
These took on such an extraordinary life of their own that this book, inevitably, is largely about events after Rorschach's death. The original idea was that patients should be shown ten symmetrical blots, and asked to comment. Perhaps surprisingly, there have only ever been ten pictures, created by Rorschach after much labour. The responses that patients produced could be placed in one of several categories --a comment on colour, one speculating on movement, identifying a particular form or so on. Rorschach had in mind 'normal' and 'abnormal' responses, some of which seem perceptive; he observed that depressives would rarely speak of colour or movement, and would worry over small details. He also saw that a run of fantastic interpretations might imply madness, or high intelligence and creativity, but was sure that the test as a whole would be able to distinguish between the two.
What he perhaps did not see was how many of his 'normal' responses would come to seem culturally specific to his time and place. He himself said to an audience in St Gallen that 'I feel about Plate 1, for example, that the only good answer is two New Year's mummers with coats billowing.' Other approved possibilities were animal-skin rugs, which might have been sensible in Appenzell in 1921. But the test was applied in the 1960s to Vietnamese freedom fighters. Their inability to suggest 'a bearskin rug' probably said nothing about their sanity.
Damion Searls largely limits his history of the tests to American psychiatry; they surface here and there otherwise, but I doubt whether any British psychiatrist has used them for years. There, the tests have long ago seeped into popular usage; only the other day, the Washington Post was describing a photograph of Ivanka Trump as 'the latest political Rorschach test', meaning, roughly, that it would reveal whether you love or loathe her. In America, the tests were grossly simplified. One development showed patients being offered a range of possible answers, obviously destroying the point of the test to reveal imagination or fantasy. The means of interpretation multiplied to an insane degree, lending the conclusion an utterly spurious scientific authority:
Let's say Mr Doe gave both of those Reflection
responses, as well as four Pair responses,
each coded '2' ... 'a pair of boots', symmetrically
located on either side of the card but not
parts of a single whole ... Plugging those numbers
in Exner's formula would produce an
Egocentricity Index of ([3x2] + 4/20 = 10/20 =
0.5: a bad sign for Doe.
The incentive to create these mathematical formulae with indisputable results, of course, was that anyone who had been on a training programme could then administer the test. No human insight or intelligence was needed: just a calculator. The US Air Force and a million human resources departments fell on the tests with great relief.
The trouble was that the tests tended to indicate psychosis where none existed, and (in one famous case) when it was administered to the most dreadful of the defendants in the Nuremberg trials, it revealed that they had an 'exceptionally well integrated personality with excellent potential'. Some research found that companies recruiting on the basis of the Rorschach tests hardly did any better at finding talent than if they had stuck pins in a list. I discover from other sources than Searls that the Rorschach tests were very widely used in the United States to diagnose homosexuality--a very damaging usage, considering that the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental illness until 1987. All that Searls has to say on this subject, with gross but unintentional homophobia, is that 'male subjects often saw the bottom center of Card I as a fleshy female torso, but homosexuals tended to see it as a muscular male torso'.
I can't help feeling that, as with so many manifestations of the human personality, there is something important and solid that the Rorschach tests reveal, but it is a mistake to try to measure it exactly. It is also a mistake to say that, because these measurements are often wrong: the Rorschach tests reveal nothing at all about the individual psychology. An interesting parallel is with individual handwriting. We all know that graphology doesn't stand up to analysis, but if we have any sense, we know that sometimes an individual's personality is quite strongly revealed by the way they put pen to paper. Similarly, it does seem clear that someone in the throes of deep depression will talk about an image in quite different ways to a clever, exuberant, imaginative person, and see different things in complex near-abstract patterns. An imaginative psychiatrist --as imaginative as Rorschach--might be able to listen to a patient talking about what he thinks he is seeing, and find it illuminating. It's just when they start ticking off possibilities that the tool stops being useful.
This appears to be the first biography of Rorschach, but has its principal interest in the comedy of American psychotherapy, which so ludicrously misused Rorschach over decades. Searls is more at home in that world than in the Swiss. I wondered, from some of his descriptions, whether he had spent much time in Rorschach's home town of Schaffhausen. It's curious, too, that though he has published translations from both French and German, he is capable of an elementary mistake, translating Kuchen as 'cookie'--it means 'cake'.
Still, it's interesting to see this important though massively misused tool in psychiatric history in its proper human context. Used properly, it might at the very least indicate imaginative resourcefulness, or its opposite. Few people will read this book without the thought crossing their minds of what the Rorschach tests carried out on our current political leaders might reveal, or who it might promptly disqualify.
Caption: Fantastic interpretations of the inkblots might imply either madness or high intelligence and creativity. Rorschach was convinced the tests could distinguish between the two.
The wisdom of the blots: Rorschach's famous ink blots have been dismissed as parlour tricks, but they're still used worldwide
Brian Bethune
Maclean's. 130.2 (Mar. 2017): p66.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Rogers Publishing Ltd.
http://www2.macleans.ca/
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[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In our current Neuro Age, with scientists and philosophers focused on the organic brain as opposed to the elusive mind, it's easy to forget what a powerful revolution in psychological thinking was wrought upon the Western world a century ago. In pop culture, psychoanalysis now has little resonance outside phallic symbolism, Freudian slips--and the ink blots.
Hermann Rorschach's iconic psychological test turns 100 this year. As detailed in Damion Searls's new book The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing, a fascinating account of the Swiss artist-scientist and the rise, fall and perseverance of his test, the Rorschach test is not in use nearly as much as it was in its heyday in the middle third of the 20th century. At that time, the ink blots--the most viewed and analyzed images of the time--were routinely shown to job applicants, accused criminals and parents embroiled in custody cases. But while it is as loathed as it's embraced among mental-health professionals, the Rorschach test is still in use worldwide and still an instantly recognized reference.
The ink blots--unsurprisingly for images that date to the time, place and forces that created modern psychology and abstract art-simply look good, and designers rediscover them regularly. In 2011, Bergdorf Goodman's Fifth Avenue store in New York used them in its window displays; a few years later, Saks sold Rorschach T-shirts for $98; Orphan Black and other edgy TV shows use Rorschach images, as did the video for Gnarls Barkley's (not inappropriately named) No. 1 hit Crazy. But the Rorschach test's enduring presence isn't a matter of style alone.
The test is sunk deep in modern cultural DNA as a metaphor so familiar that its users have no idea they have it wrong. News media are likely to call almost any startling event or contentious person a Rorschach test. Unusual activity around Spanish bonds, according to the Wall Street Journal, formed "a financial-market Rorschach test, in which analysts see whatever is on their own minds at the time." Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have called themselves human Rorschachs, meaning Americans saw the nation they wanted or hated reflected in them.
The Rorschach became notorious as the test you cannot fail: all answers are equally valid. That also made it a meaningless test--the popular assumption is that any psychologist with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of ink can make his or her own--and a test perfectly suited for our era of "alternative facts." A useful rhetorical concept, perhaps, but not one that bears any resemblance to the test Rorschach created.
Even Searls used to think, "like everyone else," he says in an interview, "that the Rorschach was some old-fashioned 20th-century thing like truth serum: if you see the hopping bunny, you're the good twin, and if you see the axe murderer, you're the bad twin." Searls has a fine eye for the absurd in his tale, taking care to note the thus-far unique response of a depressed Swiss farmer and early testee, who saw a "tragically misunderstood cauliflower" in one of Rorschach's cards, not to mention that Rorschach's nickname as a student, a tribute to his quick-sketch abilities, was "ink blot."
Yet the American writer and translator also offers a compelling account of cultural, intellectual and social ferment. Rorschach may have toiled away alone in a remote Swiss asylum, but his native land, surrounded by the Great War in full slaughter, was at the forefront of modernity, home to Carl Jung, Vladimir Lenin, Dadaists and other inventors of the 20th century. German-language thinkers had been debating for decades what William Blake (and Aldous Huxley after him) called "the doors of perception"--how humans see, think and feel. While Freud wanted to uncover the "true" meaning of our dreams, Robert Vischer--who coined, in German, the word "empathy"--wrote of artists "feeling" their way into harmony with the world, and Wilhelm Worringer argued that some artists, facing a chaotic reality, might turn to taming it through mathematical precision in representation. In 1906, Worringer wrote Abstraction and Empathy, the title of which shows, Searls notes, "what close cousins modern psychology and modern art were." For his part, Rorschach wanted to bring the cousins together.
Imbued with contemporary artistic sensibilities, and convinced humans were defined as much by what we see as what--pace Freud--we say, Rorschach became intrigued by earlier ink blot tests that aimed to measure imagination. ("If patients come up with two things, then they're not very imaginative," explains Searls, "and if they come up with 20 things, they're very imaginative.") Rorschach set out to measure how his patients interpreted images. For that purpose, the test images had to be bilaterally symmetrical, because that is attractive to the human eye, and exist on what Searls calls "the boundary of something and nothing." The final 10 ink blots, still in use today--psychologists do not make their own--are suggestive of images large numbers of responders could easily perceive. They all look like something is really there, whether a bat, bears or two waiters pouring tea. Interpretation was not the same as imagination, Rorschach stressed: unlike the latter, it imposed limits--show where you see that--particularly when two people gazed together at something in front of them.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
To Rorschach's surprise, his images soon proved predictive of mental disorders that were hard to differentiate any other way. He next started the hard work of coming up with a marking scheme. He recorded when a person gave a "whole" response (whether he or she described the entire image) or a "partial" one, whether the focus was on "form" (it's a bat) or colour or both (it's a black bat), and whether the testee mentioned movement of any kind ("two elephants kissing" as opposed to "two elephants"). He also kept track of the human, animal and anatomical images seen, and the percentage of "poor" form answers ("that might be a dog; maybe it's a cloud").
Patterns quickly emerged. Bipolar patients in a depressive phase gave no movement or colour responses and saw no human figures, but people with schizophrenic depression would frequently give movement answers. Rorschach thought, as his supporters still do, that he had crafted a valuable diagnostic tool, particularly potent in detecting latent or hidden psychosis.
That was the aspect of the Rorschach test that brought it such a resounding welcome in America, where it was adopted by the military during the Second World War and used at the Nuremberg war crimes trials and in countless job interviews. Properly applied and marked, the test works, says Searls. It does so by slipping by our defences, because "our brains are more visual than verbal. It really does tap into something more primal and emotional, so an unbalanced person is going to often fall apart on a Rorschach test, even if they don't on other tests." We understandably see what we see, but the mystery of the Rorschach is how often we cannot refrain from revealing our perceptions, Searls points out, citing one case where an applicant for a job with children knew that he shouldn't be talking about all the "sexually violent stuff" he saw, but couldn't stop himself.
The Rorschach test's impact eventually, and inevitably, faded in the face of forces that eroded its authority: individualism, relativism, pharmacological advances and a demand for clear, quantifiable results. Perhaps the Rorschach is a metaphor after all. What society sees in it--a window into the psyche or the next thing to a parlour trick--is a direct reflection of what we expect of psychology.
Caption: The psychological test developed by Hermann Rorschach turns 100 this year
Caption: Pictured above, four of the 10 final inkblots, which are still in use by doctors today
The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic
Test, and the Power of Seeing
Donna Chavez
Booklist.
113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p21.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing. By Damion Searls. Feb. 2017.416p.
Crown, $28 (9780804136549). 616.890092.
Searls portrays Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) as a man of great accomplishment and greatly unfulfilled potential
due to his untimely death, at 37. He made a considerable contribution to the then-burgeoning field of psychoanalysis
with his soon-to-be ubiquitous inkblots: 10 symmetrical amorphous shapes utilized as a tool to delve into a person's
subconscious mind. Used for everything from party games to attempting to establish whether there is such a thing as a
"Nazi mind," the Rorschach test has endured for nearly a century, even as it drifts in and out of favor within the
psychoanalytic community due to an ongoing debate over how the patient's responses should be interpreted. Very little
has previously been known about Rorschach's private life; Searls now fills in many blanks, drawing a more rounded
portrait of the Swiss psychiatrist. From his parents' money and health problems to his school nickname, Klex, from
klexen, meaning to dabble in painting, to his decision to follow science rather than art, through to his marriage, illness,
and death, Rorschach's genius is apparent, and his famous inkblots ever fascinating.--Donna Chavez
Chavez, Donna
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Chavez, Donna. "The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017,
p. 21. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442474&it=r&asid=d50b18ce4f1a5881698e02e76fe35897.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
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Searls, Damion. The Inkblots: Hermann
Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of
Seeing
E. James Lieberman
Library Journal.
142.3 (Feb. 15, 2017): p102.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Searls, Damion. The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing. Crown. Feb.
2017.416p. photos, notes, index. ISBN 9780804136549. $28; ebk. ISBN 9780804136556. PSYCH
Writer and translator Searls's book describes and analyzes a major tool in psychology, "probably the ten most
interpreted and analyzed paintings of the twentieth century." Now out of copyright (they were created in 1917), these
images are widely available, but the parlor game is not the test, and vice versa. Medical insurance covers testing and,
besides its clinical importance, the Rorschach (as it is known) is widely used by employers. Not a pass-or-fail
examination, the Rorschach aims to measure imagination and personality. Its creator, Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922)
at 12 lost his mother to diabetes; soon his father married one of his wife's half-sisters, then died in 1903 when Hermann
was 18, with three younger siblings. Reader-friendly, this book has 24 chapters, including "The Queen of Tests" and
"Iconic as a Stethoscope." A key player involved is John Exner (1928-2006), credited with resurrecting this "most
powerful psychometric instrument." VERDICT An important book that reminds us of the benefits and costs of
generalizing about the most complicated matter on Earth: the human mind. [See Prepub Alert, 8/22/16.]--E. James
Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC
Lieberman, E. James
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Lieberman, E. James. "Searls, Damion. The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing."
Library Journal, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 102+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481649164&it=r&asid=a1520b8c0235ae3d9e94cfca303fac36.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
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The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic
Test, and the Power of Seeing
Publishers Weekly.
264.5 (Jan. 30, 2017): p194.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing
Damion Searls. Crown, $28 (416p) ISBN 978-0-8041-3654-9
In this clear and well-illustrated study, writer and translator Searls shares the histories of Swiss psychoanalyst and
psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach as well as his eponymous test's evolution and reception. As Searles notes, Rorschach's
test was not totally original; one precedent was the work of Justinus Kerner, a 19th-century German Romantic poet and
doctor. Rorschach's genius lay in attending to patient-sensitive specifics, including those of psychotics, and in
developing an interpretative code that revolved around how the patient saw movement, color, and form in the inkblots.
After Rorschach's 1922 death at age 37, his test saw widespread use in America during the psychoanalytically oriented
1940s and '50s; it was given to every student entering Sarah Lawrence College starting in 1940 and the army used a
multiple-choice version after Pearl Harbor. However, it had fallen in popularity by the 1970s, eclipsed by the Minnesota
Multiphasic Personality Inventory and other personality tests. Despite its occasional abuse, the Rorschach regained
some of its popularity around the turn of the millennium. Searls dutifully shows how the test added a whole new visual
dimension to the emerging field of psychology in general, and the study and analysis of personality in particular. Illus.
Agent: Edward Orloff, McCormick Literary. (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing." Publishers Weekly, 30 Jan. 2017, p. 194.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480195236&it=r&asid=aa5b459e69d89fce4b19e67d4e611698.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
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Searls, Damion: THE INKBLOTS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Nov. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Searls, Damion THE INKBLOTS Crown (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00 2, 21 ISBN: 978-0-8041-3654-9
A history of 20th-century psychology focused on the life, work, and legacy of the inventor of the inkblot test.Translator,
essayist, and fiction writer Searls (What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, 2009, etc.) became fascinated by
the "rich and strange" set of inkblots that, he discovered, are still used for psychological assessment. His investigation
into the life of their creator, Swiss physician Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922), led to a trove of material collected by a
biographer who died before he could write his book; along with other material, that archive informs Searls' richly
detailed, sensitive biography of Rorschach's short life and long afterlife. A student of Eugen Bleuler and Carl Jung,
Rorschach was trained at a time when "an orgy of testing" dominated psychology. The son of an artist, with artistic
talent himself, Rorschach was alert to modernist art movements, which shaped his ideas about the power of visual
images to reveal personality and the power of culture to shape perception. He worked assiduously to craft precisely the
symmetrical, mysterious, suggestive images that comprise his test, and he devised "a single psychological system" of
evaluation that considered the viewer's response to Movement, Color, and Form. Although he admitted that "it is always
daring to draw conclusions about the way a person experiences life from the results of an experiment," when he
compared his evaluations of patients against other doctors' diagnoses, he was encouraged about his accuracy. As Searls
admits, Rorschach never convincingly explained how and why the inkblots worked. Unfortunately, his system, and the
permutations that followed as generations of psychologists attempted to standardize it, proves difficult to follow in the
author's otherwise engrossing narrative. Searls is stronger when characterizing the "feuds and backbiting" that the test
inspired among practitioners in America, where it "was a lightning rod from the start," and Europe, where, for example,
it was applied to assess Nazis on trial at Nuremberg.Searls shows persuasively how the creation and reinvention of
inkblots has reflected psychologists' scientific and cultural perspectives.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Searls, Damion: THE INKBLOTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA469865824&it=r&asid=5c6c3d89798a74a4c3b5756dac65bdb0.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A469865824
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What We Were Doing and Where We Were
Going
Publishers Weekly.
256.13 (Mar. 30, 2009): p31.
COPYRIGHT 2009 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going
Damion Searls. Dalkey Archive, $12.95 paper (102p) ISBN 978-1-56478-547-3
A too spare debut collection of five elegantly crafted stories by translator Searls (Rilke's The Inner Sky) explores the
exquisite indignities suffered by those with rich inner lives. The well-read narrator of the dry "56 Water Street" attempts
to write a novel about a man who circles back to where he came from, much like the fastidious writer himself whose
girlfriend is soon to leave him because he is unable to plan what happens next. "The Cubicles" is a delightful dig at the
vacuous "new economy" of Northern California, wherein the narrator is ensconced in a nebulous position at the punnily
nicknamed Prophet Corp. There, leading a "life of Circean pleasures" which keeps him from becoming a writer, he
chronicles the other sad cube-dwellers. Self-consciously writerly, Searls's work possesses a schoolmarmish charm and
hints at the fresh, smart talent he may one day become. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going." Publishers Weekly, 30 Mar. 2009, p. 31. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA200341786&it=r&asid=1358f60b9f9fbb745363a09e55065942.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
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What we were doing and where we were going
David O'Neill
Artforum International.
47.8 (Apr. 2009): pS4.
COPYRIGHT 2009 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
Full Text:
Damion Searls, a young writer known for his translations of such European writers as Rilke, Proust, and Walser, is
unfazed by working in the shadow of past masters. His debut fiction collection, WHAT WE WERE DOING AND
WHERE WE WERE GOING (Dalkey Archive, May), reworks stories by Hawthorne, Nabokov, and Gide, among
others, to portray the intellectual life of young Americans who write novels, wander the hills of San Francisco, and have
elegant epiphanies in office cubicles.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
O'Neill, David
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
O'Neill, David. "What we were doing and where we were going." Artforum International, vol. 47, no. 8, 2009, p.
S4. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA197670394&it=r&asid=b90894186434cb0d076d6447907cf5db.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
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What We Were Doing and Where We Were
Going
Margaret Lane
Reviewer's Bookwatch.
(June 2009):
COPYRIGHT 2009 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Full Text:
What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going
Damion Searls
Dalkey Archive Press
1805 S. Wright Street, MC-011, Champaign, IL 61820
9781564785473, $12.95, www.dalkeyarchive.com
Everyone sees the world differently, and author Damion Searls brings readers his own perspective through a series of
short fiction with "What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going". The anthology offers his own view of the world
through a series of highly entertaining and unique stories. Funny, thought-provoking, and a page-turner, "What We
Were Doing and Where We Were Going" is a read well worth the investment.
Lane, Margaret
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Lane, Margaret. "What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going." Reviewer's Bookwatch, June 2009. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA201802908&it=r&asid=0f95b5962f3fceb0737e1d86b6d9eaa8.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A201802908
Damion Searls and Writing Like Someone Else
By James Warner | Published: September 22, 2009
Soon after reading Damion Searls’s short story collection What we Were Doing and Where we Were Going, I read his translation of Rilke’s “Interiors,” in “Paris Review” 190, and felt some uneasiness. The voice in the translation was Rilke’s, yet I felt it was also Damion Searls’s voice.
Writing fiction can be a way of filtering one’s own life experience through what one has learned as a reader. Along these lines, one could argue that all writing is a form of incredibly free, incredibly loose translation.
Searls has compiled a collection of stories evoked by other stories. “56 Water Street” transposes the not-unannoying narrator of André Gide’s novella “Marshlands” to a more contemporary setting. There are more references to “Marshlands” here than any non-specialist reader can hope to catch. Certain words like “potamogeton,” which refers to a type of pondweed — it’s a great word – are carried from one story to the other. Later Searls says of “Marshlands” that “the literary object as such is indistinct, low-lying, in a narrow tonal range: pale blues and greens and browns. Writing isn’t spectacle, it’s a delicate gray thing; it doesn’t stand out against a background, it is its ambience.” This mood, evocative of a writer’s murky, fluid social existence, is another thing Gide’s story and Searls’s have in common.
“The Cubicles” presents a contemporary dreary job through the prism of a nineteenth-century dreary job, the one described in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Custom-House.” A line from “The Cubicles” — “In one form or another, this same change, or syndrome, came over everyone among the cubicles: I mean a certain loss, in an extent proportional to the strength or weakness of one’s character, of the self-generative mobility which distinguishes us from the vegetable kingdom.”
Searls rather aggressively creates his own precursors, setting up associations for me between authors I would not otherwise have connected. One commonality between many of the stories he selects as models is their rather labored irony. In an interview with “The Believer,” Searls has talked in terms of “the new citationism,” cf. Zadie Smith’s reworking of E.M. Forster in “On Beauty.”
In an interview with Shelfari, Searls has said, “Dubravka Ugresic, a Croatian writer I’ve worked with and a good friend, once told me she thinks every writer should serve the cause of Literature before expecting anyone to read their own writing: serve as a teacher, a translator, an editor or publisher.” Reasonable enough, although I believe there are more than four ways to serve the cause. Searls also told Shelfari, “You do find your voice a lot more easily if you try to write like someone else than if you try to write like yourself: if your story is entirely introspective and self-regarding then it’s probably going to sound a lot like all the other stories like that we’ve already read, but the farther you get outside yourself the more it’ll sound like you.”
This is good advice for most writers, but I’m wondering if Searls, in his own fiction, has not already taken it far enough — F.R Leavis said that probably most inspiration is unconscious reminiscence, a thought that may point to the limits of what conscious reminscence can achieve