The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai Read Free Book Online Page A

subject’s personality came through in any response, no matter how much that person tried to disguise or distort it.
    Introduced in 1921 by the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, the inkblot test had gained considerable influence in psychiatry, and later in psychology, as a tool for the investigation of individual personality. (It retains its high status in psychology to this day.) Until the 1960s, when standardized methods of interpreting Rorschach data gained traction, the value of the test depended on the skill and experience of the interpreter in drawing conclusions from the results. Kelley met and grew professionally close to Bruno Klopfer, a leader in championing the Rorschach test in the United States, and by all accounts Kelley was supremely talented as an interpreter. “The method must always be considered an aid to diagnosis and not complete in itself,” he wrote. “It is a technique, which when properly used, adds to the armamentarium of the psychiatrist by givinghim an additional objective method of diagnosis.” He sometimes likened gathering Rorschach results to slicing a thin piece of pie. “And as any pie eater knows, one thin slice gives a good idea of what the whole pie is like,” he said.
    Use of the Rorschach eventually spread beyond the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders to applications by the government, the military, companies, and anyone interested in determining the personality type of a prospective employee, a person seeking security clearance, or someone in search of a good career fit. But the Rorschach was only approaching wide use during the 1930s and early 1940s, when Kelley took a leading role in advancing it. In 1942 he and Klopfer published The Rorschach Technique , a detailed guide to administering and interpreting the test. Kelley’s contribution to the book focused on the use of the Rorschach in clinical settings.
    Equally fascinating to Kelley was the emerging study of general semantics, a field developed in 1933 by an eccentric engineer, physicist, and former Polish count named Alfred Korzybski. Bald, possessed of a searching gaze and the hands of a wrestler, and frequently fingering a cigarette in a long holder, the imposing Korzybski proposed a method of thinking that he believed would end stupidity and promote sanity, especially in people’s relationships with one another. He placed high importance on the principle of “time-binding,” the ability of our species to pass along collective knowledge from one generation to the next. Emotional and irrational thinking makes time-binding difficult or impossible, stunting human progress. Korzybski formalized these ideas in his influential book, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics , much of which he wrote in his home study withtwo pet monkeys sitting on his lap.
    Eager to apply these ideas to psychiatry, Kelley became a devotee of Korzybski and his new science. Kelley saw general semantics as the study of the communication and preservation of higher ideas. “This communication must be free and mutual, or persons and nations will lead themselves to self destruction by regression to an animal status,” he explained.“Maintenance and progress of higher ideas are the main distinction between human beings and animals.” He explored many applications of general semantics to clinical psychiatry. Unlike animals, who react to stimuli but cannot think of rational explanations for them, humans have the ability to change their behavior by understanding causes, circumstances, and solutions. A soldier may grow conditioned to battlefield danger by becoming cripplingly anxious whenever he hears loud noises, but the therapeutic use of general semantics in his case would persuade him that those sounds are perilous only in certain environments and from specific sources. Rational thinking can often overcome the harmful results of emotional reactions. Similarly, a skilled debater can persuade an