[Bases and principles of a qualitative approach in the phenomeno-structural analysis applied to Rorschach's method]

In the days when a first assessment was becoming necessary, twenty years after the first edition of Rorschach's Psychodiagnostic, which was being edited for the 4th time, and while he was worried about the readjustment of the scientific bases of this experiment, his friend and colleague Doctor Walter Morgenthaler was feeling the need to warn against the use, teaching and interpreting of this method of approaching personality in a too mechanical way, saying: "For some scientific problems and statistical research the simple quotation can be enough or at least the main thing, but for the very diagnosis of the personality, the mechanical side, especially the mathematical accuracy, although necessary, is nothing but a base. Many errors in the use of Rorschach's method are coming from the fact that the mechanical framework is taken as the whole result." (Psychodiagnostics, P. 254) Discovering and applying this method at around the same time, Francoise Minkowska is going to feel as well the need for its qualitative access, putting accents or suggesting proceedings in theoretical patterns, procedures and interpretation of results which will influence an overall direction close to Morgenthaler's one in this matter: "The psychogram, through its quantitative aspect, contains something static and deprives us of essential data, namely the way in which the test is going on, a process which shows us continuous comings and goings depending on various elements belonging to the person tested, to the climate of each plate, and even to the contact with the person of the psychologist" (Rorschach. Towards the research of the world of forms, P. 226). Thus, for her, a deepened qualitative analysis of the language can lie neither on word frequencies nor occurrences, nor on a metric index, but has to be necessarily combined with a meticulous observation of the patient's attitudes and contexts of expression, to claim to restore the sharp, the vivid, core, dynamism and structure of one's personality characteristics. This paper tries to work out the principles and the authentically clinical bases of this process, not so much as a rupture than in continuity with the spirit and practice of Hermann Rorschach.