Victorian Psychiatrists Upset at Wikipedia Exposing Their Voodoo Secrets

Apparently, mind-doctors are still using the Rorschach Test to diagnose the vapors, hysteria, and brain disequilibrium in their patients. And they're hopping mad, because Wikipedia has published the answers.

The Rorschach Test is a series of standard inkblots that crazy people are supposed to look at. When they describe what they see to a trained specialist, the answers will reveal the secret to their malady, which usually involves a wartime experience where some lady had to smother her crying baby to prevent the North Koreans from finding them, but the crazy person remembers it as a chicken because it was just too painful and no it wasn't a chicken it was a baby! A baby!

For many years, psychiatrists kept a tight lid on the "correct" answers to the Rorschach Test—that is, the answers that most sane people tend to give—because crafty people can game the system and slip by the rigorous diagnostic standards that psychiatrists who rely on inkblots have established. But now that someone has posted the ten inkblots and the most commonly given answers on Wikipedia, the whole Rorschach regime is threatened, and psychiatrists who rely on the process fear that they may have to resort to methods that involve science. From the New York Times:

"The more test materials are promulgated widely, the more possibility there is to game it," said Bruce L. Smith, a psychologist and president of the International Society of the Rorschach and Projective Methods, who has posted under the user name SPAdoc. He quickly added that he did not mean that a coached subject could fool the person giving the test into making the wrong diagnosis, but rather "render the results meaningless."

Because the inkblots were created nearly 90 years ago, they're no longer copyrighted, so the Rorschach community can't do much about the leak. Here's the standard test, with commonly given answers as reported in Wikipedia, in gallery form. We don't really get what the big deal is: They all look like vaginas with teeth to us.