BLOTTO HISTORY

Blotto was a popular parlor game in the 19th century. Players would make up stories of poems based on a series of inkblots that they would either either create themselves or purchase commercially. Children loved the game so much that teachers would use the game as a reward in classes for good behaviour and academic excellence

Hermann Rorschach (1844-1922), a Swiss psychooanalyst, took this popular game and used it as the basis for what is now knows as the Rorshach test, a psychological projective test used to asseess an individual's personality characteristics. Rorschach was familiar with the inkblot game and apparently, when he was a child, he played it so frequently that his friend nicknamed him Klecks, or "inkblot."

Rorshach used the inkblot in his later research in psychology as the designated field upon which patients projected their perceptions by interpreting the visual abstractions before them. Rorshach usedtheir interpretations of the forms as a basis for his analysis and research in both childhood schizophrenia and in his study of religious cult leaders in Switzerland.

His use of the inkblots, and the later subsequent thorough analysis and quantification of each image by John Exner in the 1906's, has made the Rorshach test one of the most famliar and most frequently used psychological tests in the field.