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The Contribution of the Rorschach Method to Clinical Diagnosis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2018

W. Donald Ross
W. Donald Ross*
Affiliation:
Montreal, Canada
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Extract

The Rorschach method is valuable in the study of personality and claims have been made for its application to clinical diagnosis. Clinicians would welcome any method which would help to distinguish “psychoneurotic” from “organic” disease. There is a tendency, however, to demand from a new and unfamiliar method a complete diagnosis, rather than that the technique should provide standardized information which can be used towards a diagnosis by the clinician along with other methods. Psychologists using the Rorschach method have played into this expectation to some extent and have sought to present sets of signs and types of Rorschach records which could be considered as suggesting certain definite diagnoses. This paper is concerned with the study in a wide range of patients of some of the signs obtainable by the Rorschach technique in an effort to determine what degree of specificity can be attributed to them, and what likelihood of success and failure is attached to their use.

Type
Part I.—Original Articles
Information
Journal of Mental Science , Volume 87 , Issue 368 , July 1941 , pp. 331 - 348
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1941 

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