Why Rorschach's famous ink-blots continue to intrigue almost 100 years on

As Lady Macbeth wandered the halls in torment after orchestrating the regicide of King Duncan in Shakespeare's Macbeth, it was the amorphous stain of ‘blood’ on her hands from which she reeled. The spectre was, of course, an alarming hallucination. However, the substance of the vision illustrates in exquisite detail the brain's persistent and overriding desire to ‘fill in’ the missing parts of an image (see cartoon). G D Schott's Revisiting the Rorschach ink-blots: from iconography and psychology to neuroscience1 offers a fascinating look at the Swiss psychoanalyst's clinically sublime system of uncovering the nuances of personality.

As Schott explains, it is the interweaving of art and science that makes Hermann Rorschach's tests …