What's Wrong with the Rorschach? Science Confronts the Controversial Inkblot Test - Hardcover

James M. Wood; M. Teresa Nezworski; Scott O. Lilienfeld; Howard N. Garb

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 078796056X ISBN 13: 9780787960568

Publisher: Jossey-Bass, 2003

Synopsis

Since its creation more than eighty years ago, the famous Rorschach inkblot test has become an icon of clinical psychology and popular culture. Administered over one million times world-wide each year, the Rorschach is used to assess personality and mental illness across a wide range of circumstances: child custody disputes, educational placement decisions, employment and termination proceedings, parole determinations, and even investigations of child abuse allegations. The test's enormous power shapes the lives of hundreds of thousands of people -- often without their knowledge. In the 1970s, this notoriously subjective test was supposedly systematized and improved. But is the Rorschach more than a modern variant on tea leaf reading?

What's Wrong With the Rorschach? challenges the validity and utility of the Rorschach and explains why psychologists continue to judge people by their reactions to ink blots, in spite of a half century of largely negative scientific evidence.

What's Wrong With the Rorschach? offers a provocative critique of one of the most widely applied and influential - and still intensely controversial - psychological tests in the world today. Surveying more than fifty years of clinical and scholarly research, the authors provide compelling scientific evidence that the Rorschach has relatively little value for diagnosing mental illness, assessing personality, predicting behavior, or uncovering sexual abuse or other trauma. In this highly engaging, novelistic account of the Rorschach's origins and history, the authors detail the wealth of scientific evidence that the test is of questionable utility for real-world decision making.

What's Wrong With the Rorschach? presents a powerfully reasoned case against using the test in the courtroom or consulting room - and reveals the strong psychological, economic, and political forces that continue to support the Rorschach despite the research that has exposed its shortcomings and dangers.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"In this brilliant, powerful book, four experts on clinical assessment expose the fatal flaws of the famous inkblot test. Casting their penetrating critique in gripping narrative form, Wood, Nezworski, Lilienfeld, and Garb have composed a requiem for the Rorschach that will fascinate anyone interested in how clinical psychology is now transcending its prescientific past."
-- Richard J. McNally, Ph.D., professor, Harvard University, and author of Remembering Trauma

"By demolishing the misconceptions and exposing the weaknesses of the Rorschach as it is currently used today, the authors have paved the way for this infamous psychological phoenix to rise again from the ashes."
-- Edwin E. Wagner, Ph.D., psychologist and author, The Hand Test and The Logical Rorschach

"A much-needed rigorous analysis of the Rorschach, a must-read for anyone who cares about validity issues in clinical assessment."
-- Gerald C. Davison, Ph.D., professor and chair, Department of Psychology, University of Southern California

"A thorough, scholarly, and devastating critique of the Rorschach inkblot test. Attorneys will no doubt find the book invaluable as an aid to prepare for cross-examination of psychologists who use the Rorschach in their work."
-- Solomon M. Fulero, Ph.D., J.D., psychologist and attorney, professor of psychology, Sinclair College, Dayton, Ohio

"Wood and his coauthors provide such a fascinating history of the immortal Rorschach inkblot test that it's easy at first to miss the troubling implications of the tale. The well-told story is so engaging that one does not have to be a nerd or combatant in the Rorschach wars to read on for fun. The sense of a serious problem magnifies as the tale unfolds, and the reader realizes that important clinical and legal decisions still routinely depend on the results of this unreliable and invalid test."
-- James C. Coyne, Ph.D., professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania Medical School

About the Author

James M. Wood is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso.

M. Teresa Nezworski is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Scott O. Lilienfeld is an associate professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta.

Howard N. Garb is clinical associate professor of psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.

Edition details

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 078796056X
• ISBN 13: 9780787960568
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 446