Could you give us a brief introduction to inkblots?

People have always been interested in seeing things - seeing things in the clouds, in tea leaves, in blots of ink. It stimulates their imagination, and in some cases they feel they’ve learned something. So when I was asked to work on the Redstone Inkblot Test [a character test based on people’s responses to inkblots of different shapes and colours - as described in an Observer feature on 26 December 2010], the obvious association was with the Rorschach Test [a psychoanatytical testing tool in which patients are asked to view and interpret ten inkblots]. But there’s a much bigger and older pedigree one could draw from.

Which takes us to your first book.

Marina Warner’s Phantasmagoria, which explores what happened in the age of science to everything that might be related to the immaterial, the numinous, the irrational. It’s in some ways a history of the unknown - which has gone through several phases, hasn’t it? The spirit world, the divine, the unconscious.

Is Warner a psychologist?

No, she’s a cultural historian. She looks at everything from table turning to Ouija boards, spirit photographs, the irrational in the modern age, ghosts, and monsters. She says wonderfully suggestive things, and she has an excellent chapter on the Rorschach Test.

What does she say?

Well, there have been inkblot tests around for ages, but in the 19^th century they took over from silhouettes as the parlour game, partly due to a German doctor and poet called Justinus Koerner, who was a friend of the German Romantics and was interested in the nascent science of psychology and such things. He’d write endless letters, and he doodled in them, and started playing around with inkblots. He was the one who worked out that you could make inkblots symmetrical by folding them over.

What’s the significance of that?

Of the symmetricality? I think it just makes them more suggestive, more organic, more physical. They can look like MRI scans, or pelvises, or bugs. It makes them look more biological. Anyhow, what he’d do was make these inkblots in his letters and then embellish them - turn them into imps and monsters and devils, all sorts of little creatures. But they’re also slightly self-portrait-y. And then he’d write poems about them.

About the inkblot creatures?

Yes, he published a collection of inkblots and related poems called Klecksographien. It started a huge craze. Everybody started making their own inkblots, as aesthetic pieces, or as the basis of stories, or as a way of discovering themselves. Koerner started thinking of them in mythological terms, or about their mythologizing effect: whether there might be something hard-wired in the brain, a collective memory or thinking.

Where’s Andy Warhol in all this?

In the history of inkblots, the experiment of Hermann Rorschach [1884-1922] is the most famous moment: a controversial attempt to establish a scientific personality assessment based on ten standard Rorschach inkblots. Then comes Andy Warhol, who in the 1980s reconnects inkblots with the art that came before. He did these huge, very sexual, strange, hieratic paintings which he called ‘Rorschach Paintings’ - although they were, in fact, entirely of his own invention. At the opening a journalist asked him what they meant and Warhol - in that amazing, neutral, “I’m a mirror” way of his– said, “Oh, I made a mistake, I got that wrong. I thought the idea was that you make your own inkblots and the psychiatrist interprets them. If I’d known, I’d just have copied the originals!”

Why do you think Warhol was so interested in them?

Partly because of his idea of an artist – in this case, an abstract artist – in an age of mass reproduction. He was a great believer in the American Dream. It didn’t matter who you were, you could still drink the same Coca-Cola or eat the same hamburger as Jackie O., say, so there was something very utopian about his images of iconic consumer objects, of which the Rorschach Test was one by then.

Consumer psychoanalysis?

Yes.

And do you think he was at all interested in applying the blots as a personality test - in anything more than the aesthetic surface?

Well, Warhol is also a very extreme example of what can happen to the self in a consumer culture. He can’t stand anything as direct, or messy, as emotional intimacy, or even sex really. Like Oscar Wilde, but even more so, he rejects nature, only accepts the artificial, worships technology, and is amazingly complexed about the body: I mean, talking about sex he makes Philip Larkin look like a love machine.

So he’s using inkblots as a way of hiding, of keeping people at a distance?

I think so. Warhol said he didn’t know if he was capable of love, but that he stopped even thinking in terms of it when he got his first tape recorder. Instead of having relationships, he’d just go round interviewing people. When he talks about anyone, it’s always in terms of their problems; it’s the beginning of confessional as well as celebrity culture, of reality TV. It’s all in this line of his - When people are talking to me, I don’t know, and they themselves don’t know, if they’re performing or if they’re being authentic.

Your next book?

Victor Hugo – he was one of the people experimenting with inkblots, and this is the most wonderful book. During his exile, partly imposed and partly voluntary, in the Channel Isles, Hugo stopped writing for a while and went into a fury of artistic production; and he liked to use very modern techniques that exploited chance to work up his effects.