Photo: Unknown film still, USA, ca. 1932, Corbis.
Psychology is a curious field. It does not abide by the Hippocratic oath, for its practitioners are Ph.D.s rather than MDs, and thus are not bound to the moral construct that advises, “First, do no harm.”
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Psychology, as an institution of practice, is a modern invention that established itself in the late nineteenth century. It’s quite comfortable with making it up as it goes along, relying on ideology above all. Its history is riddled with practices that do the opposite of what it portends. Despite being a social science, people mistake it for medical science, and that is where our story begins.
A psychologist and his patient, USA, ca. 1950, Corbis.
, edited by Julian Rothenstein (Princeton Architectural Press) brings together some of the quackiest content from its past, some of which that has never been seen before and long-hidden in the archives. Consider the “Odor Imagination Test,” “Everyday Guilt Test,” or the ”Personality Tree”; to our mind today, they sound silly, if not absurd—but once upon a time doctors delivered these tests with the intention of diagnosing you with a disorder.
What makes these tests remarkable is how crafty they are. The desire to “know thyself,” a quote commonly ascribed to Socrates, is at the very root of all philosophical impulses. To do this requires patience, honesty, and consistent rational thought; it’s much harder than it looks given the brain’s malleability in a pathological world. To know thyself, one has to dig, dig, then dig some more. It might take years, decades, even a lifetime to undo the damage inflicted by the culture in which we live—including the belief that these quizzes will lead us to the promised land.
From “The Rorschach Inkblot Test”, Redstone Press collection
As Lionel Shriver writes in the book’s introduction, “What’s especially stupid about psychological testing is that the psychologists think we’re stupid. That is, the test designers fail to give subjects credit for being able to intuit the purpose of the test, and thus which answers it is in heir interest to provide. Even way back when, looking at Rorschach inkblots, half-sussed patients knew perfectly well that they were better off seeing not bats but butterflies. Were you to tick, when taking a personality test as part of a job application, ‘I am afraid I am going out of my mind,’ you would indeed be out of your mind.”
The trick of these quizzes is the way they feed into our narcissism, rather than speak to our soul. It’s easier, albeit inadequate, to take the superficial approach. The desire to “know thyself” is human and when unsatisfied, will constantly be in search of itself. Yet the quizzes and games presented here speak less to who we are, and reveal more about the testmakers’ minds, their presumptions, predilections, and biases. There’s something rather pathetic about it all: its pomp and self-importance pierced by levels of ignorance that reveal itself as indoctrination in the service of something more insidious.
Illustration from “The Relationship Test”, Drawing by Adam Dant.
But Psychobook does not claim any of this. It simply calls these things “fun” because it has removed peeled back the veneer of the its practitioners and discovered a car full of clowns. And I suppose, if you’re not living in Georgia or Alabama right about now, ain’t nothing wrong with laughing at clowns.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
