Rorschach, Hermann 

Psychodiagnostik [Psychodiagnostics: Inkblot Test Plates]

Bern: Verlag Hans Huber, 1921. A full set of ten plates (180 x 245mm) on heavy cardstock in the original cardboard folding chemise, with the original blue paper band around the plates. Orange pastedown label in German only, without the English translation and without distributor information—signifying the true first edition. Import stamp of C.H. Stoelting and Co., Chicago, each plate numbered, and rubber stamped with Stoelting’s information. In spectacularly fine condition; with no qualifiers. Item #1334

The printing history of Rorschach's plates is a mess, and almost everything sold as a "first edition" is nothing of the kind. The actual first printing was produced in 1921 by Ernst Bircher, Rorschach's original publisher, on thin, flimsy cardstock, sold in a paper envelope alongside a booklet, these are rare in commerce with only one set sold at auction (Kiefer Buch, 2009). When Hans Huber (who had been an employee of Bircher) purchased Bircher's stock, he began printing the plates on heavier cardstock in the format that persists to the present day. The sets routinely offered as "1921 first editions" also bear a 1921 date, but their labels translate "Psychodiagnostik and identify Grune and Stratton as the American distributor—features that postdate both our set and Huber's formal 1932 "second edition" (zweite Auflage), which is also considerably scarcer than the Grune and Stratton sets. The same is true of the French distribution sets, which translate the title as "Psychodiagnostic," name Presses Universitaires de France as the exclusive distributor, and carry the same 1921 copyright despite being equally late productions. Both the American and French sets, despite their printed dates, are at best the third overall printing and more probably later still. Our set predates all of them. The untranslated German-only label, the absence of any distributor on the pastedown, and the import stamp of C.H. Stoelting (a Chicago firm that had dropped the Rorschach plates from its catalogue by 1931 and was never the permanent American distributor) place this set as the earliest Huber printing, the second overall after Bircher's, and the first produced in the format that became standard. In fine condition, with the original paper band intact, this is the finest example known.

Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss psychiatrist whose combined interests in art and psychoanalysis led him, beginning in 1911, to experiment with inkblots as a diagnostic instrument—initially to distinguish neurotic from psychotic patients, and specifically to identify schizophrenia. He published his method and findings in Psychodiagnostik in June 1921, but died the following year at thirty-seven of peritonitis, leaving the work largely unfinished. The test attracted little attention during his lifetime. It was not until the 1930s, through the independent efforts of Samuel Beck and Bruno Klopfer in the United States, that the inkblots were widely adopted, first as a clinical tool and then, by 1939, as a projective test of personality—a use of which Rorschach himself had been skeptical. By the 1960s it was the most widely administered projective test in the world, employed in clinical, forensic, and military settings, and it remains, after more than a century, psychology's most recognizable symbol: ten bilaterally symmetrical images, unchanged since their creation, that continue to provoke interpretation, controversy, and fascination in equal measure.

Price: $7,500.00