Corine de RuiterEditorial Editorial Special Section: Forensic Assessment and Projective Methods

asked me if I would be willing to serve as guest editor for a special section in the journal on forensic applications of projective methods. The special section needed to be filled with contributions from col-leagues from across the globe to ref lect the international nature of Ror-schachiana and the ISR. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a rather difficult enterprise. Three authors promised papers, but never sent in their contributions, not even after several extensions of the deadline. This is, of course, rather disappointing, because in many respects one could argue that the use of projective methods and the Rorschach Ink-blot Method in particular is increasingly popular in forensic assessment. The recent publication of the Handbook of Forensic Rorschach Assessment (Gacono & Evans, 2008), containing 27 chapters divided over 616 pages, bears witness to this development. The Rorschach inkblot method (RIM) is a helpful tool in finding an-swers to all kinds of psycho-legal questions. Because it is an indirect test method, that is not completely transparent to the subject, it is less vul-nerable to impression management than traditional self-report meth-ods. Moreover, by including the RIM in a forensic test battery, one in-creases the number of test methods and information sources, allowing cross-validation of diagnostic conclusions. We can put more faith in our diagnostic conclusions when two of more different test methods or in-formation sources show similar results, than when they diverge. The necessity of using multiple test methods and cross-validation has been advocated by scholars such as Gregory Meyer (Meyer et al., 2001)