Bear, Bat, or Tiny King? On the Rorschach Test | Hacker News Reader

Bear, Bat, or Tiny King? On the Rorschach Test

lrb.co.uk

10 pointssamclemens3 comments

It's tragic that in countries like Argentina this test, and many other projective tests, test based in psychoanalitic pseudoscience and with lots of evidence against them, are routinely used by therapists and taught in universities. Another example of a commonly used projective tests is the HTP, where you draw a human, a tree and a person and a they are interpreted according to baseless dogmas.

If somebody wants to read details about results of research about the Rorscharch and projective tests I recommend Lilienfeld's paper "The Scientific Status of Projective Techniques". You can google it as a pdf.

And for a divulgational reading about the topic this article at Scientific American is quite good http://digitalcommons.utep.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Fortunately in USA and Europe psychology has embraced science (or is very willing to do that, I mean, even if the research cannot be always replied or doesn't use the best methodology, the scientific method predominates). In Argentina psychologists are mainly postmodernists, anti-science, attatched to Lacan's revelations. Of course there are exceptions, but it's difficult to uproot all the charlatans from the public universities and hospitals.

I have mixed feelings about what you're saying and about the article.

On the one hand, I completely empathize with what you're saying--it's mystifying to me when I see practices continue when there's so much empirical data about them to suggest they shouldn't be used. In the US less-well validated procedures are on the wane, but they still appear in use from time to time.

On the other hand, although I agree Lilienfeld's paper is excellent, buried in it is the complicated truth that some projective tests do demonstrate evidence of validity. There's also the tricky issue that a test is not just a stimulus set, but a procedure, and even certain ways of the Rorschach have proven useful empirically. But all these things have been forgotten or ridiculed because of the current anti-projective zeitgeist. That is, certain projectives, used in a certain way, are invalid, and it happens those have been the most popular, but if you take another hard look at the data, it's not true of projective tests in general.

The article provides a nice overview of the Rorschach, but the end is puzzling to me. The MMPI is one of the best-validated behavioral measures in history, and the examples are so misleading that I wonder about the author and Annie Paul's motives. An item such as ‘My mother is (or was) a good woman’ isn't interpreted in isolation, and even if it was interpreted in such a way, it has predictive value in the same way as your social media history that so many services are starting to scrape for prediction also. It's an interesting article that ends on a note of incompetent ignorance.

On a mental health, the US has the highest[1][2] prevalence of mental health issues in the world. You can't really conclude much from this except I think it suggests that there could be over diagnosis. I wouldn't say the US is exactly at the forefront of everything mental health related. My real issue is that I new many kids growing up who had diagnosis who then in result suffered weight gain, high cholesterol and other health problems when they didn't really have control of their situations.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/10/why-more-...

[2] Bipolar is definitely highest in the US http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/03/07/US.highest.bipolar.rate...

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