The Hermann Rorschach Archives and Museum

Hermann Rorschach: a short biography

• Hermann Rorschach was born in Zurich, on November 8,1884, the eldest of four children. His father was a drawing teacher. In 1886 the family moved to Schaffhausen. His mother died in 1897, when he was twelve; he lost his father in 1903, when he was nineteen.
• After finishing high school in 1904 he studied geology and botany at the Académie de Neuchâtel for one term and afterwards completed a course in French at the Université de Dijon. He entered medical school in Zurich in the fall of 1904.
• At the age of 22 he decided to become a psychiatrist. During the winter term 1906/1907 he studied in Berlin, from where he traveled to Russia for the first time. During the next term he studied in Berne. In the fall of 1907 he registered again at the University of Zurich, where he graduated in the spring of 1909.
• After his exams he traveled to Russia again and stayed there several months. In late summer 1909 he worked as resident in the Thurgovian psychiatric hospital in Münsterlingen. He married his fellow student Olga Stempelin from Kazan/Russia in 1910.
• His doctoral dissertation "Über Reflexhalluzinationen und verwandte Erscheinungen", supervised by Eugen Bleuler, was published in 1912. After a short interlude in the psychiatric clinic in Münsingen (near Berne) Hermann and Olga Rorschach went to Russia, where he obtained a well-paid position in the fashionable Krjukovo asylum near Moscow.
• Back in Switzerland in 1914 he accepted a position as resident at the Waldau Psychiatric University Hospital near Berne. A year later he was appointed associate director of the asylum at Herisau, in the eastern part of Switzerland.
• His book "Psychodiagnostik" was published in 1921. The method presented in it became world-famous as the Rorschach test.
• Hermann Rorschach died on April 2, 1922, at the age of 37, leaving his wife and two small children.