We would like to inform the Associations and individual members that make up the International Rorschach Society that the Roman Rorschach School from today will no longer be part of this scientific community.
We attach the official document sent to the President and Board members so that you can understand the reasons that led us to such an extreme choice. This decision is all the more bitter considering that our School, in the person of Professor Carlo Rizzo, was among the early founders of the International Society.
We are sure that many of you will understand our motives.
We will meet in other scientific contexts where we can return to the constructive discussion that broadened Rorschachian horizons for each of us.
In spite of the criticism and the obvious decline in colleagues’ interest in the Test, the writer is absolutely certain that the Reagent devised by Hermann Rorschach is the best Personality Investigation Technique and like all ingenious creations destined for ‘immortality.
Patrizia Pes and Salvatore Parisi
Communication to SRI.
Dear President and members of the Board of the “International Society of Rorschach and other projective methods,” albeit with deep regret the Roman Rorschach School has decided to end its relationship within the International Rorschach Society.
We are currently the oldest Rorschach Institute in the world in operation, certainly the oldest among the founders of the International Rorschach Society, which later became the “International Society of Rorschach and other projective methods.”
It has been several years and at least 5 congresses since we have been in the “common house” we used to frequent, where we could exchange opinions, research and insights to further scientific work on this beloved and extraordinary instrument of ours. At the conference level now, the spaces are at the total prerogative of the debate between the two Exnerian-derived methods, R-PAS and CSIRA, with a huge loss in the quality of scientific discussion.
Already in 2002, in the opening message of the 17th Rorschach Congress, of which the Roman Rorschach School was the organizer, Salvatore Parisi, who was its president, emphasized how precisely the differences in theoretical models, to which the different schools referred, constituted an asset for the development of the Rorschach, unlike what was considered by North American colleagues and reiterated later in the lectio magistralis of the 2017 congress, who called them “a Babel.” The possibility of arriving from different cultural and methodological points of view to describe the personality of a subject in the most precise and impeccable way has always been an asset for us.
In the subsequent congresses in Barcelona and Leuven, the space reserved for schools of thought not traceable to the Comprehensive System has been gradually thinning out, leading to a kind of “single thought” of Rorschach, the North American one, which discredits and obstructs the European and South American culture that has contributed so much to and valued the multidimensionality of the Test.
In 2013, when the copyright of the Stains came to an end, we were contacted by the Giunti OS publishing house in Florence, an important and prestigious company that distributes psychological tests in 16 different countries, which asked our School to offer technical advice for the supervision of the prints; we agreed to work alongside the publisher, free of charge. Giunti OS would have printed them anyway, regardless of our cooperation, which was also desired in order to ensure a better reproduction of the Tables, since a gradual deterioration in the quality of the Hogrefe publisher’s prints had already been observed for years.
This choice of ours has seen ISR close itself off in defense of the publisher Hogrefe, to the point of amending the Society’s bylaws and recognizing as the only legitimate Tables those produced by the same, in addition to the attempt to expel the Roman Rorschach School from the International Society.
The situation today sees Hogrefe having staked its entire marketing promotion on one of the two North American-derived methods, the R-PAS, to the point of going so far in advertising as to devalue the other Rorschach methods, calling the North American method the “Scientific Rorschach.” Also because this system is really far from the Rorschach of Hermann Rorschach and all those giants of European, North American and South American scholars who have, from congress to congress, until the 1980s, enriched the Rorschach culture with their discoveries and research, so much so that it has become the most accurate Personality Investigation Technique on time.
The current obvious decline in the interest of physicians and psychologists in inkblots is in our opinion also the fault of this short-sighted policy.
For these reasons, and with a delay due only to patient waiting for a change of course that never happened, the Roman Rorschach School confirms its inescapable decision to leave the “International Society of Rorschach and Other Projective Methods.”
Rome, 06/23/2024 The President
