As I indicated in my previous letter of decline, I had found the article offensive-a hatchet job if you will. That other reviewers reacted in a similar way, I find confirming.
For those of us who have devoted a considerable share of our professional lives to the Rorschach, and have come to love it, we regard the method much as a baby. In addition, as a parent, one is ready to defend and protect one's child.
To get a sense of how I feel, I refer you to Bill Kinsella's short story, The Thrill of the Grass. It is the tale of a group of men, relative strangers to one another, who are bound together by a powerful love of baseball. Without a word spoken, one evening they break into a major league park, in Oakland as I recall, and replace the artificial turf with natural grass. These are men of love and passion.
Like baseball devotees, Rorschach loyalists may be divided into two camps: those who are drawn to the numbers and statistics-the empiricists; and those who are drawn to narrative, subjective meanings, and human drama-the clinicians. In our Rorschach ballpark we argue, fight, and compete with each other. Yet, there is a position for everyone, for we all share an abiding respect and love for the method.
If someone chooses not to play, if his or her interest lies elsewhere, that is fair enough. However, to not have played, to not have immersed oneself in a protocol, carefully sifted through the rich imagery, and then struggled to translate the data into psychological meaning so as to understand and help a troubled human being; to not have done this, but instead, to sit outside the ballpark in front of a television set and cavalierly pronounce the process an invalid waste of time, unfit for patient and student consumption, that is not okay. It is disrespectful and unacceptable.