photo courtesy of Novella photography, Matt & Paulette Griswold
Time to air our hidden fascination with projective testing! That's right--no conversation about
introversion would be complete without considering the Rorschach test... would it?
Most of you know the Rorschach test as an ink blot test. It is a standardized series of ambiguous pictures with very specific rules for coding responses to the cards. Some are in black and white, and some are in multiple colors. According to KW Bash, Rorschach's test actually measures introversion and extroversion. But he said some other neat things, too. So this blog is dedicated to Bash-ing some more boundaries on considerations of temperament!
You may be wondering what one has to do with the other, especially when Rorschach even distanced himself from the Jung-Freud conflict. Well, he did represent the two "attitudes" of introversion and extraversion (how Jung referred to them) by associating these "psychological functions" (how Rorschach and Ellenberger referred to them) with movement and color in their testing patterns: Introversion was associated with responses about movement and extraversion with responses about color when subjects viewed the blots. Bash asserted that Rorschach's "introversion" and "extratension" that he sought to capture with his test were "essentially identical with the Jungian 'attitudes'" (Bash, 1955, p. 240).
Perhaps even more interesting is that the relationship is somewhat complex: Bash quotes Rorscach as having said of his conceptualization, "...I must draw nearer to Jung, who distinguishes an attitude of the conscious and an attitude of the unconscious and says: When the attitude of the conscious is extraverted, then the attitude of the unconscious is complementarily introverted" (Bash, 1955, p. 239). To be very clear, this means that you are both introverted and extraverted at the same time! How interesting, then, if you are consciously introverted and unconsciously extroverted, and your mate is the opposite...
The problem is that this conceptualization was put to the test, showing that certain "types" could reverse their type under certain circumstances. In fact, researchers started to wonder about the actual stability of "introversion" and "extroversion." Further testing on a much larger sample caused researchers to conclude that introversion and extroversion form stable "type traits" that are bimodally distributed.
That answer is less definitive than it sounds: more recent analyses have found correlations between Rorschach's measurement and Eysenck's Personality Inventory introversion-extraversion factor (Ferracuti & De Carolis, 2005), but other researchers contend that Jung's introversion and Rorschach's idea of introversion are actually referring to two different things (cf. Piotrowski, 1937). This could be, as the term introversion had its naissance in the roots of depth psychology (which I will address in a subsequent post).
Does Rorschach provide an end to the debate? Not close. But it is certainly an interesting blot on the history of introversion research!
