George Van Ness Dearborn’s Experimental Studies with Inkblots

A William James’ pupil and friend, American psychologist and neuropsychiatrist George Van Ness Dearborn (1869–1938) carried out a remarkable research programme that combined psychology, physiology, medicine, and education. While working especially at the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, he was the first to use inkblots for the analysis of imagination and personality, well before Rorschach’s Psychodiagnostics. Between 1897 and 1910, he devoted at least four significant articles to the experimental application of inkblots. Nevertheless, Dearborn’s contribution to the development of this kind of test is one of the lesser-known aspects of his work. With this paper, we reproduce these articles because of their historical importance and ground-breaking character for Rorschach’s later studies in personality.