Contemporary Perspectives on Rorschach Assessment

Summary: In the last 20 years the advent of the Comprehensive System has developed the Rorschach Inkblot Method (RIM) into a standardized and psychometrically sound personality assessment instrument with numerous indices that can be reliably coded, show considerable test-retest stability, and have abundant valid corollaries. Rorschach assessment has demonstrated utility in contributing to clinical diagnosis of psychopathology, providing guidelines for treatment planning and outcome evaluation, and identifying adaptive and maladaptive features of how people attend to their experience, use ideation, modulate affect, manage stress, view themselves, and relate to others. The RIM can also be effectively integrated with more structured self-report inventories in a complementary way that describes personality functioning in greater depth than would otherwise be possible. The RIM remains at present a widely used and extensively researched measure in many parts of the world. Although the inkblot method is essentially a culture-free instrument with universal applicability, further research is needed to establish cross-cultural normative data concerning its variables.