Chapter 9 Using the Rorschach with Children

Among omnibus personality instruments, the Rorschach is the one measure that covers the life span most extensively. By the time children have reached early school age, clinicians can feel comfortable using standard Rorschach variables to help create personality descriptions and plan interventions. From that point on, as Leichtman (1996) put it, “Examiners can now give the test in its most complex forms and expect that children will respond in ways comparable to those of older subjects” (p. 62). Being able to use the same test across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood brings some distinct advantages. The Rorschach’s variables become like old friends as we follow them over the developmental years and beyond. Shifts in the balance of color to form (FC:CF C) track the youngster’s increasing ability to modulate behavior when emotion plays a part. The steady decrease in the Egocentricity Index (3r 2/R) documents the progressive decentering that Piaget (1952, 1959) identified as an important part of childhood maturation. The stability of form quality (X %) over the developmental years lets us know that perceptual conventionality is a feature solidly consolidated by early latency (Exner & Weiner, 1995). This chapter is about using the Rorschach with children. It begins with a description of the stages very young children move through on their way to producing “standard” Rorschachs. It then delineates the domains this multifaceted instrument covers—coping strategies, affect, interpersonal function, self-concept, information processing—and suggests how findings from each of these domains can help clinicians describe youngsters and plan interventions for them. The chapter concludes with an illustrative case example.