Wednesday September 28, 2005
Discerning meaning
Back when I was a boy, psychologists used the Rorschach ink blots to test mental health.
Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss psychiatrist who developed his theories in the early years of the last century.
His principle is simple. The ink blots mean nothing. They are utterly random. They are not supposed to represent anyone or anything. What matters is what you, the patient, see in them.
According to Rorschach, a mentally healthy patient saw the large pattern; a mentally ill patient focussed on the details. The healthy patient sees a butterfly or a bat; the ill patient sees crocodile jaws or squiggling maggots.
Rorschach also considered the kind of images the patients thought they saw. One sees two old men playing pattacake; another sees fighting dragons. One sees a cuddly rabbit with floppy ears; another sees a monster with slavering fangs and fiery eyes.
But none of these are in the blots themselves. They come from the patient\’s mind.
Four hundred million deranged?
My father was doing his PhD at that time. He took a standard set of Rorschach ink blots to India with him, and tested several thousand Indian students. That was a very small percentage of the total Indian population, of course. But if it was at all representative, my father concluded, the entire sub-continent was mentally ill. Some 400 million people (the population of India in the 1940s) did not fit Rorschach\’s definitions.
My father concluded that the existing norms for judging Rorschach\’s blots were culturally conditioned. Our social and religious culture expected healthy people to perceive things in certain ways; the Hindu culture of India had different expectations.
As our formerly homogenous North American society becomes increasingly multicultural – to say nothing of multi-religious – we should remember that conclusion. Different cultures see things in different ways.
That doesn\’t make them right. Or wrong. I may believe that rigid Islamic society treats women like dirt, or worse. But I should not be surprised that they operate out of a different mindset.
The only clearly wrong approach is expecting – no, demanding – that another culture conform to one\’s own norms. That the entire Indian sub-continent – a billion people, today – take remedial psychological counselling until they see ink-blots the same way I do, for example.
Or, closer to home, to insist that any perception of the Bible other than one\’s own must be wrong.
Biblical perspectives To receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to jimt@quixotic.ca. E-mail subscribers also get excerpts from correspondence about these columns. Please forward a copy of this column to anyone who might be interested in subscribing.
If you want to order my books, you can call 1-800-663-2775 in Canada, 1-800-328-0200 in the U.S., or order them on-line at the Wood Lake Books website.
For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
It\’s also worth pursuing Richard Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
Here I find myself in sharp disagreement with conservative churches and their captive politicians.
I think of the Bible as a verbal Rorschach ink blot. The words tell a story, just as the ink blots form a pattern. Both are fixed, on paper. But it\’s pointless to argue about what those words and images are supposed to reveal to us. All that matters is what we perceive in them.
Do we look at the big picture? Do we put it in context? Or do we focus on details, spinning them together into a pattern of hidden meanings? Do we discern friendly images, or hostile ones?
It\’s not what the Bible says that matters, but how we respond to what it says.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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