Kleksographien

The great psychiatrist Justinus Kerner wrote in 1857 a book that presents a series of InkBlot Tables, accompanied by a series of poems. His book is entitled Kleksographien, and it is printed here in full facsimile of the original edition. A classic in InkBlot psychology. Justinus Kerner is a famous psychiatrist, and a father of romantic medicine, but he is also one of the greatest German poets of the nineteenth century. His Kleksographien is based on the popular game of Kleks: inkblots to express the soul. The expressive work of Kerner has had great success at the time, and it has circulated throughout the Europe. In the late nineteenth century, dozens of psychologists, including Dearborn and Broadbent, used the kleks (i.e. the inkblot tables) to build a Personality Test. The InkBlot Test is studied and developed in many universities in France, the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and so on. In 1921, last but still appreciable, the young physician Hermann Rorschach enters this tradition, uses the well known Inkblot Test for the study of Personality, and publishes a book on the classical Psychometry. The thirty-eight Rorschach died suddenly, shortly after the publication, and the book was forgotten. Many years later, the work of Rorschach is taken up by a psychiatrist, of Freudian school, and it is reprocessed as if it were a psychoanalytic tool, though the original work of Rorschach had remained away from this interpretation key. Most of the followers of this new vision seems completely unaware of the fact that the Inkblot Test to study Personality is not at all an original invention of Rorschach, nor it is a psychoanalitic device, and that his research is just the nth contribution to a much older psychological tradition. And that is why the faithful reissue of the Kerner's Kleksographien, accompanied by the duly documented history of the Kerner's InkBlots and of the veritable InkBlot Personality Test till to date, is so interesting, especially for many unaware psychologists of our times. http: //papers.psicotecnica.it/scheda_kerner_kleksographien.html
About the Author: Felice Perussia is full professor of general psychology in the six centuries old University of Turin. He has been the first Principal of the Psychological Faculty, and he works since many years in general psychology, and particularly in the field of psicotecnica, or the art-of-mind (psychotechnique in the latin-european style). That is: psychological testing (the methodological side of psicotecnica), but also hypnosis and psychodrama (the active side of the art of mind). On these subjects, Perussia has published many scientific papers and handbooks.