At an early age, he read the collected lectures and
interpretations of dreams by Sigmund Freud. Then he poured through everything
the university library had to offer on the subject of physiognomy, from
Aristotle to contemporary writers. At 16 (in 1939), he devised a method which
used the contraction of individual facial muscles to define a person's state of
mind. This involved creating his own system for analyzing character, based on
two dimensions, the first "directive-receptive" and the second
Aconstant-variable, that remain part of his present-day regulation psychology.
From 1938 to 1941, Max Lüscher also studied the graphological teachings of
Ludwig Klages and enriched his own theory of personality or character by
borrowing from that of Klages.
He noticed that after taking several wrong turns, he always
stumbled upon the right answer by abandoning the conventional approach of
choosing categories based on empirical findings and adopting the logical
categories provided by the thought processes instead. Although he was not
familiar with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant at that point, he clearly
recognized that without realizing it, we always apply categories supplied to us
by our thought processes in order to label and categorize phenomena. That also
made clear to him the corollary that his first priority must be to identify and
comprehend categories of thought so that they could then be applied as a
research tool. He realized that he should solve the problems by resorting to
these logical categories and the unbiased phenomenological method. The process
of searching out the best possible precise psychological concepts for categories
to be used in his regulation psychology was to take several decades. He knew
that, in a departure from conventional psychoanalytical terminology, they could
definitely not be defined in terms of physical body parts (e.g. oral, phallic),
space (e.g. introverted, level), or time (e.g. archetype, phase).
At that time, even though he was only sixteen, he had
already received special permission to attend lectures and seminars on
psychology and philosophy at the University of Basel. At eighteen, while still
in high school, he learned about the famous test developed by his fellow
countryman Hermann Rorschach and developed a method of using the test to assess
logical thinking. The psychologist at his school was Professor Probst, who
taught students at the university how to use the Rorschach test, and it was
Professor Probst who arranged for him to receive an excused leave of absence
from school to allow him to write down his new method. He also wanted Max
Lüscher to do additional research on the color diagnostics which he had
developed for the Rorschach test.
This impetus was to decide Max Lüscher's subsequent destiny.
Even at that early point, his main interest was focused not on the test, and not
on the colors, but on the primary goal of understanding the structure of the
human psyche. Initially, he was interested in the psychology of color only as it
related to the Rorschach test. But because the answer to this problem eluded him
at first, he stuck with it till he managed, over the course of five years from
1941 to 1946, to resolve the question in a sufficiently logical and empirical
manner.
Unlike many others, he recognized that the sensory perception of color is
objective and universally shared by all, but that color preferences are
subjective, which is a distinction allowing subjective states to be objectively
measured by using test colors. Max Lüscher was given unlimited access to
patients and patient records by Professor John Stähelin, the head of the
psychiatry department, in 1941. That allowed him, right from the very start, to
develop and conduct research on his color diagnostics using patients and
schoolchildren from special observation classrooms over a period of six years.
By a stroke of luck, Karl Miescher, the General Manager at Ciba, which was at
that time the largest chemical company in Basel, took a personal interest in the
psychology of colors, and he made a laboratory, materials, and workers available
to Lüscher while special test colors were being developed, which took
approximately five years. Between 1941 and 1946, he was engaged in the attempt
to sort through 4,500 different shades of color applied to many different
materials (paper, metal, wood, film, silk, wool) and find those which provided
an exact match for his psychological system.
While he was a student, age 22 to 24 (1945-1947), as director of the
Psychotechnical Institute of Basel, he had sole charge of psychological
diagnostics for personnel evaluation. This job brought him to the realization
that color diagnostics were not only simpler and faster, they also outperformed
previously utilized tests in terms of their ability to provide more
differentiated and more essential results.
In 1947, when he was 23 years old, Max Lüscher spoke on his
color diagnostics in Lausanne, at the first world congress for psychology after
World War II. His color test became known in international circles as a result,
and its theoretical underpinnings were published in the proceedings of the
conference, a volume entitled "La Diagnostic du Charactère" (Presse
Universitaire, Paris 1949). This paved the way for Max Lüscher to teach classes
on his color diagnostics in Paris at the Sorbonne Department of Psychology and
the Paris Ministry of Labor in 1949 and 1950. While still enrolled at the
university (1947), Max Lüscher was elected to the board of the Philosophical
Society.
The professors of psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy who graded his doctoral
examination (1949) found that the psychological merits of the color diagnostics
deserved to be ranked "summa cum laude" and noted in the "Laudatio" praising the
work that Max Lüscher's color diagnostics would go down in the history of
psychology.
After his doctorate (1949), he was elected to the
Anthropological Institute of Switzerland, which financed the living expenses of
future university professors of philosophy for three years as a stipend. During
these three years while receiving the stipend, he lectured in the auditorium of
the University Basel, which was always filled to capacity, and worked in his own
practice as a psychotherapist, where he relied mainly on dream interpretation, a
skill he had acquired in Paris.
A Swiss periodical printed an article featuring his psychology of color, which
led in 1952 to a request by the largest German newspaper conglomerate that he
come work for them in Hamburg as a consultant. There he signed consulting
contracts of several years' duration with, among others, the world's largest
advertising agency and, over periods lasting several decades, with top German
industrial companies. This gave him ample opportunity to intensify demographic
and cultural research expanding the color diagnostics based on statistical
studies using large samples.