“Famous clinical psychologists used the Rorschach Inkblot Test to arrive at incredible insights. But were the astounding performances of these Rorschach Wizards merely a variation on astrology and palm reading?” —Skeptical Inquirer
I have previously written about the incredible value of intuitive psychological testing, including the Rorschach, in psychodiagnostics, and the perils of skeptical debunkers lumping it in with paranomal phenomena.
Psychological testing is only a problem if you expect it to conform to scientific standards. Here’s the secret — interpersonal perception and interactive skills do not conform in that way. It is not that the Rorschach is similar to vaudeville performance based on ‘cold reading’; turn it on its head — cold reading is based on the same intuitive depth perception about people, although usually unrefined by clinical training of course. The same parallel exists with hypnosis, where the same skills may be used as stage entertainment or valuable clinical tools. Calling it ‘mere entertainment’ and calling it ‘unscientific’ are two time-honored debunking tools often uttered, as here, in the same breath.
The ability to read others is both revered and reviled, in an unbroken thread from the peculiar marginal position of the shaman through the psychiatrist cartoons that perennially adorn the pages of the New Yorker, revealing the literatis’ fearful fascination. (There’s also that predictable reaction when someone at a dinner party asks me what I do and I decide to reveal to them that I am a psychiatrist. All of a sudden their demeanor changes and they are reviewing their prior banter with me to figure out what they might have revealed inadvertently to my supposedly penetrating gaze. Yet they are too fascinated to simply avoid me thereafter, so what follows are all manner of ‘curbside consult’ and friend-of-a-friend query in displacement.) And most people think of psychics as parlor trick performers or hucksters on late night television. The human propensity to detoxify potent magic by turning it into mere entertainment, protecting ourselves against its impact by putting it up on stage and therefore inside a frame distinguishing it from ‘reality’, is primeval, and reaches its apotheosis in a society that has lost its capacity to experience the sacred and the mysterious.
And the psychotherapist’s role is always performance art, in an important sense — it exists to induce the willing suspension of disbelief in the listener/analysand, to enlist them in building a shared, compelling, but fictive, belief system, spinning yarns which heal by making more usefully coherent and sensible meaning of their life. The lack of falsifiability (the empirical scientific standard) of some of the claims about a person’s life that come from psychotherapy is only a problem if you have not been enlisted in believing, or if the resulting ‘truths’ are put to nefarious uses as they are in ‘recovered memory’ cases, where the level of ‘reality’ they signify is confused. (“The map is not the territory,” as Korzybski said.) CSICOP doesn’t seem to understand that, in which case there is ‘no use arguing about religion’.
