Barack (Rorschach) Obama

Special to FreeRepublic ^ | 20 June 2008 | John Armor (Congressman Billybob)

[Congressman Billybob]

Run a Google search for the combination of Rorschach and Barack Obama. You’ll get about 49,000 hits. I’ve read a fraction of those, beginning in 2007 and including the June 2008 one when Obama called himself a Rorchach.

It is curious that apparently none of these reporters and pundits bothered to find out what that psychiatric test was for, how it worked, and what it meant. People assume that a Rorschach indicates a person or event that can mean different things to different people.

That is certainly true of Barack Obama as a candidate. It is also true of his vaunted speech on race relations in the United States, the second most common use of the Rorchach reference. But, that’s not what the test is.

The comparison is actually more apt than all these tens of thousands of reporters and pundits think. But reaching that conclusion requires homework on Rorschach himself.

Dr. Rorschach died only four years after he developed the test that bears his name. He wrote about it only preliminarily. Other psychoanalysts years later developed the test to its status as the second most used analytical tool today. Most people have never even seen a Rorschach Test, much less taken one.

Here’s how it works: Dr. Rorschach had a background in fine arts as well as medicine. With that combination, he discovered a certain fact about responses to certain stimuli. As “the Original Rorschach Website” explains. “While working in a psychiatric hospital with adolescents, he noticed that certain children gave characteristically different answers to a popular game known as blotto (Klecksographie).” Remember what the ink blots look like: they are all images of half a blot, mirrored left with right so the final image is symmetrical.

The images are abstract. None represents anything in the real world. There is no “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.” (See Marcel Duchamp, 1912.) There is no murderer with an ax. (See Jack Nicholson in The Shining, 1980.) In short, there is zero factual content in the Rorschach images.

What results from the use of the Rorschach Test in psychiatry? The paradox of the ink blots is that people with specific emotional states will “see” similar results in the same blot. Others, who do not share that emotional state, will not “see” that. What the test reveals is not the fact of what’s really on the paper. It reveals, instead, the emotional predilection of the patient.

Now, with an understanding of what a Rorschach test is, we can judge the common use of that phrase with respect to Barack Obama and certain of his speeches.

First, the phrase applies because there is no content in Barack Obama’s speeches. Like cotton candy at a carnival, they are spun with energy and heat from a teaspoon of sugar into a quart of confection. But, the candy melts down to nothing when one delves for factual content. Like Rorschach’s blots, the candidate and his speeches have no objective meaning. The viewer’s conclusions come from the viewer, and nowhere else.

Second, because there’s no real content, there are no “right” or “wrong” responses. The only reason to track the viewers’ responses is to look for patterns. Do certain people with certain emotional predilections have common responses? If so, who are they, and what are their psychiatric states?

Do the positive reactions to Barack Obama come primarily from people who are both desperate and impatient? Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, in 1854, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Is this half of the lesson learned from the Obama ink blots?

People who genuinely want “change” to occur, ought to be concerned with what change should happen? How it should be done? Who will benefit from it? Who will pay for it? These are logical questions about any public policy issue, from elementary school education to global thermonuclear war. Do the favorable responses to Obama indicate people who are too impatient to ask such obvious questions such as who, what, when, where, why and how?

It is particularly sad to see reporters nodding with assent when their supposed stock in trade is the asking of just such questions.

What diagnosis flows from the Obama Rorschach Test? Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist, No. 68, that the Electoral College would prevent anyone offering merely “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity” from winning “the distinguished office of President of the United States.” Does today’s Rorschach suggest that Hamilton was wrong?

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About the Author: John Armor practiced law in the US Supreme Court for 33 years. He now lives in Highlands, NC, and is working on a book on Thomas Paine. John_Armor@aya.yale.edu

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[PGalt]

WOW! OUTSTANDING article John! Thanks for writing/posting.

The comparison is actually more apt than all these tens of thousands of reporters and pundits think.

Propagandists have an easier time creating a candidate from a tabula rasa.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Nice writing, John.

Where do you link to older articles?

[Redhd2]

Very interesting insight.
Thanks for sharing.