Hi, Michel.
Hi. You wanted to talk about the Rorschach
test?
Yes, your biographers write that you had a
life-long fascination with it. Apparently
you got the equipment for conducting the Rorschach
shortly after your final university degree.
Until the 1960s, you even gave courses about
it...
True. After my degree in philosophy I had
gotten an additional diploma in psychology.
Very quickly I was fascinated with all kinds
of psychological test and diagnostic tools,
in particular this one where the test subject
is asked to respond to a series of cards showing
inkblots, by freely offering her or his associations.
In contrast to the talking cure of psychoanalysis,
the responses are carefully noted and calculated.
Yep. There is an entire coding system you
have to learn. In general, the emphasis is
not so much on the content of the responses
but on their formal aspects, for example whether
or not the test person takes into account
the entire picture or specific details, or
if colors are mentioned. Reaction time is
also a factor in this.
Sounds complicated, indeed. And reminds me
of the disciplinary practices you describe
in your later work…
That’s a good point. But you know what?
I always enjoyed performing this test on my
friends and colleagues, even my students.
I pretended the Rorschach would allow me to
know what’s on their mind…
Why did you pick the Rorschach? For obtaining
this goal, you could have used any psychological
test.
In 1950s France, the Rorschach played an important
role in bridging the fields of psychiatry,
psychoanalysis, and philosophy. The key point
was the question of the image, something I
always was interested in. In addition, I was
friends with Jacqueline Verdeaux who happened
to put me in touch with people that dealt
with or were interested in the Rorschach,
in Paris for example the psychiatrist André
Ombredane and the philosopher Gaston Bachelard,
in Switzerland psychiatrists such as Roland
Kuhn and Ludwig Binswanger.
I recall that in 1954, in your very first
book, Mental Illness and Personality, you
talk about Kuhn and Binswanger. When discussing
a paranoid psychotic, the question of images
is crucial: “Each face, whether strange
or familiar, is merely a mask, […] the mask
of the persecutor.” (p.53).
Exactly. The shapes depicted on the Rorschach
plates are often perceived as masks. Kuhn
had discussed this phenomenon in a book that
Jacqueline translated and to which Bachelard
contributed the preface. Oh, by the way: on
one of our trips to Switzerland, Jacqueline
and I went through a very special experience
at Kuhn’s clinic in Münsterlingen. It was
during the carnival season, and the entire
city was full of masked people. Now, all the
patients and the psychiatrists of Kuhn’s
clinic would also dress up, carry masks, and mingle
with the inhabitants…
However, thinking of masks is only one possible
response to the Rorschach plates. I feel myself
more inclined to see animals, for example
bats.
Yes. Other test subjects recognize humans.
For example here, two waiters or stewards
who are also often seen as two chimpanzees
or as a mirrored Punch.
Which leads us back to the puppet theme and
the question of doubling.
What do you mean?
As Deleuze was saying, the theme that has
always haunted you is that of the double.
Yeah, but in the Rorschach the doubling is
simply a result of the way in which the inkblot
images were created, namely by folding paper
– or (to be more precise) by drawing images that look like if
they resulted from putting ink onto a sheet
of paper and then folding it.
But this is precisely what Deleuze meant,
that the double “is never a projection of
the interior” but an “interiorization
of the outside”…
Hold on a second. The Rorschach test became
world famous as a projective test – because
the test person is asked, and rather successfully
asked, to project her or his interior thoughts
onto the plates.
Sure. But we are not talking here about the
test subject. We are dealing with the one
who is conducting the test, in this case yourself.
So, you become your own double by interiorizing
the outside – based on your psychological
interest in your friends and colleagues, your
historical work and all of your writing…
This, then, might also be the reason why I
was re-embodied as a puppet? As a mask, as
it were, that is placed right next to the
face of the real Foucault, like the two symmetrical
parts of a Rorschach plate?
The Foucault diagram created by Deleuze also
looks like some Rorschach plate. I was rather
struck by the fact that the central part of
it is named “Fold” and “Zone of Subjectivation.”
If I get this right this then would mean that
only through my existence as a puppet, or
double, I am becoming a subject? But it could
also suggest that, in this way, I am turned
into the ultimate projection screen for everything
and nothing. I have to think about it.
Not sure if this helps, but Deleuze claims
that “to think is to fold.”
See you around.
See you.
