Archive 1992–2014

Responses to the Rorschach test plates obtained from 75 patients with paranoid or simple schizophrenia were analysed in terms of the presence of a certain type of absurd utterances and of content related to covering, shading, or something missing. Results of the analysis were compared to the material obtained from 63 healthy controls assessed using the Rorschach test. "Absurd" responses were significantly more frequent in the group of patients, which was interpreted as indicating their psychical dissolution. Responses, in which covers or covering of a part of a blat by another figure had been mentioned when describing Plates II and IV, turned out to be significantly more frequent among the patients. A twofold explanation of the finding was proposed: the result was either due to psychopathology, or to the patients' higher sensitivity to boundaries of human cognition. "Shading responses" as well as those with "something missing" were rather rare in the material studied and did not differentiate between the two groups. Interpretation of the findings on the grounds of assumptions of hermeneutics is considered as a proposal open to further cognitive processing. The study dealt with material difficult to analyze objectively. Besides, the analysis included not only "absurd" utterances, but also some content aspects not reported in the literature so far – therefore the research should be regarded in a sense as a pilot study only.