James M. Wood – författare

Since its creation more than eighty years ago, the famous Rorschach inkblot test has become an icon of clinical psychology and popular culture. Administered over one million times world-wide each year, the Rorschach is used to assess personality and mental illness across a wide range of circumstances: child custody disputes, educational placement decisions, employment and termination proceedings, parole determinations, and even investigations of child abuse allegations. The test's enormous power shapes the lives of hundreds of thousands of people -- often without their knowledge. In the 1970s, this notoriously subjective test was supposedly systematized and improved. But is the Rorschach more than a modern variant on tea leaf reading? What's Wrong With the Rorschach? challenges the validity and utility of the Rorschach and explains why psychologists continue to judge people by their reactions to ink blots, in spite of a half century of largely negative scientific evidence. What's Wrong With the Rorschach? offers a provocative critique of one of the most widely applied and influential - and still intensely controversial - psychological tests in the world today. Surveying more than fifty years of clinical and scholarly research, the authors provide compelling scientific evidence that the Rorschach has relatively little value for diagnosing mental illness, assessing personality, predicting behavior, or uncovering sexual abuse or other trauma. In this highly engaging, novelistic account of the Rorschach's origins and history, the authors detail the wealth of scientific evidence that the test is of questionable utility for real-world decision making. What's Wrong With the Rorschach? presents a powerfully reasoned case against using the test in the courtroom or consulting room - and reveals the strong psychological, economic, and political forces that continue to support the Rorschach despite the research that has exposed its shortcomings and dangers. James M. Wood (El Paso, TX) is Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, at the University of Texas at El Paso. M. Teresa Nezworski (Dallas, TX) is Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Dallas. Scott O. Lilienfeld (Atlanta, GA) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta. Howard N. Garb (Pittsburgh, PA) is on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of Studying the Clinician: Judgement Research and Psychological Assessment.

How a gay newspaper columnist dominated a city’s nightlife from the 1930s to the 1960s

Winsor French was a journalist with a singular voice. A self-described “effeminate young man,” French occupied desks in city rooms drenched with masculinity, enduring his colleagues’ homophobia and risking the loss of his job by defending unconventional behavior. He ignored newspaper taboos by publishing the price of bootlegged liquor during Prohibition and by writing stories about “sepia” entertainers, Jewish socialites, schoolchildren in wheelchairs, and men who found males more exciting than females.

French’s reports of urban nightlife appeared in Parade, a magazine he founded and edited, as well as in two Cleveland newspapers, the News and the Press. His most illuminating observations were items in an about-town column, a metropolitan newspaper format begun in the 1920s to publicize the local affairs of café society. French’s wanderlust, however, led him to extend his geographical boundaries from downtown Cleveland to the “smoke and music” haunts of Havana, Hollywood, Manhattan, Paris, London, and Pago Pago. His sources were crooners, deckhands, fan dancers, hoboes, gangsters, millionaires, redcaps, torch singers, and several of the twentieth century’s most celebrated stage, film, and literary artists, including Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, Somerset Maugham, and Cole Porter.

The four decades of French’s professional career are often described as an era that forced homosexuals to be sexually vague and anonymous, especially if they aspired to prominence in their local community. But French’s life and career contradicted that assumption. He never hid his sexuality yet achieved journalistic leadership and unchallenged influence over Cleveland’s social life. Richly illustrated with contemporary news photographs and editorial drawings, Out and About with Winsor French documents the powerful role played by about-town columnists during a raucous episode in the history of American newspapers.