Google celebrates 129th birthday of Hermann Rorschach with interactive inkblot doodle

Web users can today get an insight into the deepest reaches of their psyche as a new Google doodle celebrates the 129th birthday of Hermann Rorschach, who devised the famous inkblot test.

The black-and-white "doodle" features an illustration of the psychoanalyst sitting with notepad and an animated pen that appears to scribble as the page loads.

Rorschach seems poised with attention directed outwards, as if to scribble down what the viewer makes of an inkblot image held up by a disembodied pair of hands.

The viewer becomes the focus of the artwork, now able to decide what they see in the inkblot image, which can be changed for a new one by clicking arrow buttons or refreshing the page.

Most of the paintings shown are ambiguous but the Google doodle team have thrown in some clearer pictures too, including one of a pair of gnomes.

The Google user is then encouraged to share what they have seen in the image via social media.

The Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst was born on 8 November 1884 in Zurich. As a child he was known as “Klecks” - literally "inkblot" - due to his fascination with klecksography, the art of making inkblot images.

As a youngster Rorschach loved both art and science, and on graduating from high school he wrote a letter to the famous German biologist Ernst Haeckel for advice on choosing which discipline should form the basis of his career. Haeckel suggested science, and Rorschach enrolled in medical school at the University of Zurich.

He later studied under the renowned psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who had previously taught Carl Jung. Rorschach found the excitement generated by the psychoanalyst movement - led by Sigmund Freud - reminded him of his childhood feelings about making inkblot paintings.

This memory led Rorschach to wonder why people have different responses to the same inkblot images, so he started showing the paintings to children so that he could assess their varying responses.

In the test he developed, the subject was shown 10 images and asked to describe the object or figure they saw in the painting. This technique was allegedly designed to reflect unconscious parts of the personality that are "projected" onto the stimuli.