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- Robert Walser was born on 15 April 1878 in Biel, Switzerland. He was a writer, known for Der Räuber, The Walk (2021) and The Year of Living Locked Up (2020). He died on 25 December 1956 in Herisau, Kanton Appenzell, Switzerland.
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Hermann Rorschach, born 1884 in Zürich, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who devised the inkblot test that bears his name and that was widely used clinically for diagnosing psychopathology. His father, Ulrich Rorschach an art teacher, encouraged him to express himself creatively through painting and drawing conventional pictures. Hermann was known to his school friends as Klex, or "inkblot" since he enjoyed klecksography making fanciful inkblot "pictures". Later he enrolled in medical school at the University of Zurich, and took on a job as first assistant at a Cantonal Mental Hospital. While working at the hospital, Rorschach finished his doctoral dissertation in 1912 under the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who had taught Carl Jung. For several years his main interest was psychoanalysis, and he became a staunch advocate of the then new psychoanalytic technique in Swiss medical circles. In 1917 Hermann Rorschach discovered the work of Szyman Hens, who had studied the fantasies of his subjects using inkblot cards. In 1918 Rorschach began his own experiments with 15 accidental inkblots, showing the blots to patients and asking them, "What might this be?" Their subjective responses enabled him to distinguish among his subjects on the basis of their perceptive abilities, intelligence, and emotional characteristics. The Rorschach test is based on the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli-in this case, inkblots. From these cues, trained observers are supposed to be able to pinpoint deeper personality traits and impulses in the person taking the test. After published the results of his studies on 300 mental patients and 100 others in "Psychodiagnostik" (1921), Rorschach died a year later at the age of 37, of peritonitis, probably resulting from a ruptured appendix. In 2001 the inkblot test was criticised as pseudoscience and its use was declared controversial by Scientific American, as different psychologists drew different findings from the same data, suggesting their results were subjective rather than objective.