Originally Posted by spockman
Apparently it is psychologically unethical, though. For the untrained to apply it.
Yeah, but this goes beyond just the Rorschach test; it's a violation of APA ethical standards for any person to administer a psychological test that they are not trained to administer.
The Rorschach and other so-called projective tests like the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) are interesting. The philosophy behind how they're supposed to work is fairly obvious: supposedly, in interpreting the open-ended stimuli on the test (ink blots for the Rorschach, ambiguous scenarios for the TAT, and others), people "project" part of their personality onto the stimuli, and the clinician can supposedly gain insight from interpreting the patient's answers.
As you can imagine, the tests have been heavility criticized -- to the point of being invalidated -- on the grounds that they lack both objective validity (i.e., different therapists can interpret the same answers in different ways) and even consistency (i.e., the same patient may give wildly different answers for the same stimulus on different occasions, although we wouldn't assume that they had actually changed substantially).
Projective tests are still used in therapy, but not for the purpose that they were originally developed. Clinicians by now are well aware of the significant problems with using open-ended tests like this. Instead, some clinicians will introduce them under the guise of a serious test, when in fact they are only using the test to break the ice and get the patient talking about their issues. The actual results of the tests are typically ignored altogether. So they end up being useful in a roundabout way, as long as you remember not to take them too seriously.
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