children are given? Once you learned your A’s, B’s, and C’s, and began connecting the letters to create words and sentences, you probably noticed that even though you and your classmates were learning the same techniques in the same manner at the same time, your handwritings were not alike at all! You may have thought your penmanship was beautiful and perfect—just like the template you copied from. But Jonathan’s writing was different—his letters seemed to be crammed together. Danny wrote so hard you could see indentations through the back of his page. Sarah’s handwriting was large with big loops, while Carmen’s was smaller and rounded and didn’t have much of a slant. You wondered: How can that be? How can we learn to write the same letters the same way but have our writing turn out to be so different?
Since handwriting—and the skills of creating letters on the page—comes from our deeper self, it contains a great deal of information about our character. Whenever we write, our immediate emotions, moods, or state of mind influence our expression on paper. Our brain transmits this information to the motor reflexes in our hand. Therefore, our handwriting is a unique combination of our conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings. Our handwriting reflects our personality in a way that is similar to our facial expressions, speech, and body language. It is, in essence, body language on paper.
The slants, strokes, size, pressure, and speed with which our pen glides on a page create this window to the soul. As we change and mature, so does our writing. Haven’t you noticed the changes in your handwriting over the years, or even from day to day, depending on your mood or health?
The qualities in handwriting and its relationship to the writer have been studied for centuries, and they continue to hold fascination for psychologists, writers, philosophers, legal professionals, historians, and anyone else seeking deeper knowledge of the human character and condition.
The History of Graphology in a Nutshell
Beware of the man whose writing is always like a reed in the wind.
— CONFUCIUS
From prehistoric times, when early man began painting on cave walls through Egyptian hieroglyphics and to the early alphabets of the Greeks and Romans, there has always been interest in the relationship between the art of writing and the character of the writer.
Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, observed that writing styles were as unique to each individual as his or her speaking voice. He even studied the link between the writer and his handwriting.
The Roman historian, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus noted that Emperor Augustus Caesar did not separate his words well on paper, which implied that he was unwilling to let go of money, material things, and his own feelings.
Camillo Baldi (1550-1637), a physician and educator, and dean of the College of Philosophy at the University of Bologna, published a treatise in 1625 called Trattato come de una lettera missiva si conoscano la natura, e qualitá dello scrittore (How from a Missive Letter One May Know the Nature and Qualities of Its Writer), which explored the relationship between handwriting and personality.
Two hundred years later in Paris, the priest and scholar Abbé Flandrin (1804-1864) and his student Abbé Jean-Hippolyte Michon (1806-1881) devoted much of their lives to the study of handwriting. Michon subsequently published papers on his system of handwriting analysis, which detailed how specific elements or “signs” (such as strokes and individual letterforms) correspond to particular personality traits. He coined the name graphology to describe this study. This term and his method became widely known and accepted. Michon is also credited with stimulating widespread interest in graphology in both public and academic circles, and he was the founder of the Societé Français de Graphologie, a leading institute that still exists.
Another Frenchman and student of Michon’s, Jules Crepieux-Jamin (1858-1940), took his theories one step further. Instead of individual “signs” corresponding to specific personality traits, he believed that handwriting should be examined as a whole and that its interpretation should be dependent on other features. He divided the basic elements of handwriting into seven categories: dimension, form, pressure, speed, direction, layout, and continuity. Crepieux-Jamin’s approach became the basis of the French school of graphology. It also became influential in the field of psychology and laid the groundwork for the Gestalt approach to handwriting analysis.
Toward the end of the ninteenth century, the Germans jumped on the graphology bandwagon and began making their own contributions to the field. Wilhelm Preyer (1841-1897), a professor of physiology, compared the handwriting of individuals when, the hand, the foot, and even the mouth held the pen. Preyer noted marked similarities in the form and structure of each sample and concluded that “hand” writing is really “brain” writing, because it is centrally organized in the brain. The process of mentally or physically visualizing letters and then transmitting that information to the sensory and motor areas in the brain that control our motor skills is what creates our writing form on paper. This insight has been confirmed by our knowledge that people who have had a stroke see their handwriting as seriously impaired, whereas those who have a hand prosthesis can eventually recover their handwriting skills. Another German psychiatrist, George Meyer, discovered that moods and emotions account for subtle changes in handwriting. These revelations of Preyer and Meyer inspired other psychologists and scientists to become interested in graphology.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Ludwig Klages (1872-1956), a philosopher and graphologist, and author of Die Handschrift als Gehernschrift, applied Gestalt theory (Gestalt meaning “complete” or “whole”) to his studies, broadening the scope of graphology. He is thus responsible for founding the German school of graphology, which looks at the whole of a handwriting sample rather than equating an individual stroke with a particular trait. Klages also introduced students of graphology to the concept of rhythm in writing (i.e., the ease with which the writer expresses the contraction and release in the writing pattern and stroke on the page—whether it is stilted or spontaneous, and shows fluidity in the implementation of the letters). Klages coined the phrase “form level,” which refers to the overall pattern of the writing by its style, symmetry, simplicity, legibility, creativity, good movement, and rhythm. He also concluded that handwriting is a balance between the conscious and unconscious aspects of our nature. This view could be compared to music in terms of rhythm, harmony, and psychic balance.
In Switzerland, Max Pulver (1890-1953), a professor at the University of Zurich, studied Klages’s work and applied the psychological methods of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud to handwriting analysis. He classified handwriting into three “zones”—upper, middle, and lower—each corresponding with a distinct area of personality (similar to Freud’s discovery of the superego, ego, and id). Pulver also introduced the symbolism of the space on the page—the meaning of the left and right sides of the page, as well as what the width or narrowness of the top, bottom, and side margins means.
DID YOU KNOW?
Famous people who were fascinated by the hidden language of handwriting include Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Carl Jung, and Albert Einstein. They made accurate observations about people in relation to their handwriting.
Other contributions in graphology were made by Robert Saudek (1880-1935), a Czechoslovakian who conducted experiments on the speed of handwriting, and Rudolph Pophal (1893-1966), a professor of neurology in Hamburg, Germany, who studied how the brain affects written strokes on a page and introduced the concept of tension and release in handwriting. As a neurologist, Pophal studied brain functions and conducted research on the physiological side
