Tuesday 13 September 2016

overt and covert

Beginning with some lines of haiku lifted from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Hyperallergic explores how the battery of diagnostic tests that psychologists use or purport to use (recalling that for the Rorschach ink blots and the like, there are no wrong answers—just crazy ones) taken out of the clinical-setting and context become accidental-art. I especially enjoyed the primer on the now discredited narrative-type or storytelling exams, like the Thematic Apperception Test or Make a Picture Story that operated on the principle that the subject’s motives and character would be revealed by his or her projections, since our veiled self-indictments must mean that we are repressed or vicarious ourselves.