Ok, Google. So, really. In 2013, we're really supposed to think that Hermann Rorschach and his claim to fame are anything other than overwhelming evidence that materialism is as prone to generating the rankest of florid, absurd, superstition and that, unlike religion in the modern west, it can attain legal power through its pseudo-scientific assertions?
In my research into the prophet of 19th and early 20th materialist monism, Ernst Haeckel, I came across Rorschach. He was one who sought guidance from the expert of scientistic German atheism as to whether or not he should pursue his interest in art or in "natural science". I use the scare quotes because I won't honor either man or his product with the designation of science because they're evidence of the decay of science instead of specimens of science. Haeckel advised him to leave art behind. I assume, given it was the young Rorschach who sought out Haeckel in this regard that he shared his disdain of religion. Rorschach published on the topic of religion, choosing to focus on the most atypical of bizarre cults, symptomatic of the mental illness of the leaders and those they gulled. Which, one might suspect, made what they said about religion as relevant to most peoples' understanding of it as what the most insane of pseudo-scientists said about science told us about sane scientists. Rorschach being one of those, both as a cultist of pseudo-scientific Freudianism and as an originator and practitioner of some of its most pseudo-scientific and unfounded nonsense.
I am pressed for time today or I'd go into the folly that a faith that every single aspect of the experienced universe fits into a neat scheme of materialist cosmology and the emotional necessity of such materialists to jam everything they come across into one, but that would take more words than I can spare just now. The field of psychology and the related pseudo and ersatz sciences never fail to reveal how insane the results of that can be, when you look at it in light of the expressed materialist faith of its expositors. But that will take books instead of a blog post.
The position of that materialist faith in our legal apparatus is the product of the desperation of dealing with those dangerously and tragically unable to function as rational beings, past the point of toleration. That any legal use has been made of the assertions of psychologists, psychiatrists, etc. on the basis of their interpretations of what they have gotten people to say about ink blots us a troubling sign as to how irrational a faith in something asserted to be science can be. It is as valid as the opinion of an entrails reader or an astrologer but with the pretense that it was ever scientifically validated makes it far more potently dangerous. And that is only one of the absurdities of psychology that can literally mean life or death, freedom or incarceration under our scientific regime.
I'd kind of figured inkblots had gone the way of Freud's Thanatos. I actually came across a comment one day on matters religious, which commenter blamed the fear of death on religion. Pure Freudian bunk of the first order, and an idea only held onto by the painfully ignorant who deem themselves wisest. I know Freud was terribly influential on writers in the early to mid-20th century, but by then he'd already been superseded by new theories of psychiatry, and by now psychology and psychiatry have splintered into so many schools all traces of Freud, or even Jung or Adler, have been wiped out.
ReplyDeleteFreud lingers in the popular realm, however, where people speak of ego, id, superego, and subconscious, without really knowing what they are talking about (or that no one in the field really takes such terms seriously anymore). Without any research to back it up, I imagine that is the only place inkblots dwell, as well. Somehow they are more suited for a sociopathic super-hero in a bad pastiche of comics cliches than for reality.
I was pretty amazed that Google thought such bunk worth celebrating: http://incorrectpleasures.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/lilis-thought-for-day_7.html
ReplyDeleteHave you ever read the book House of Cards by Prof Robyn M. Dawes? There's stuff about the ink blots in it. I'd recommend his books.