Julian Rothenstein and Mel Gooding’s Psycho-Room displays a treasure trove of psychodiagnostic tests and games.
It brings together items from the Wellcome depository of the Science Museum, donated art works, and specially constructed exhibition panels.
The objects were designed to be creatively engaged with, and an informative pack of cards (the PsychoBox) is still available to buy from the museum shop.
Drawing completion tasks, personality tests, thematic apperception tests and psychological games reveal glimpses of a 20th century psychology that intersects with psychoanalysis at many points. Visual illusions show us that the human mind continually constructs theories about the world – a fundamental Freudian proposition – while multi-phasic personality inventories are explicitly based on analytic ideas.