MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewIt is the fortunes of this humdrum test that Damion Searls charts in his impressively thorough, if somewhat dry book. The Inkblots is part biography of Hermann Rorschach, psychoanalytic supersleuth, and part chronicle of the test’s afterlife in clinical practice and the popular cultural imagination ... It is only toward the end of The Inkblots that Searls introduces research showing that when it comes to predicting human behavior, the Rorschach performs no better than chance. Up until this point, he treats the question of whether the test actually works or not as almost an incidental one, an abstract curiosity in his cultural history. But this is a mistake...the question of the Rorschach’s basic validity is not an interesting aside, but fundamental to the entire story ... Prioritizing the human beings impacted by this history would have made not only for a more readable book, but also a more responsible one.
