The Definitive Book of Handwriting Analysis

The Complete Guide to Interpreting Personalities, Detecting Forgeries, and Revealing Brain Activity Through the Science of Graphology

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

Contents

In April 1841, Graham Magazine published Murders of the Rue Morgue, the famous detective story by Edgar Allan Poe. The introduction to the tale contained passages adapted from Poe's work on "autography" or handwriting analysis, which first appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger:

The analyst ... glories ... in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talents into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have in truth, the whole aim of intuition.

Poe makes it clear that there are systemized procedures to "autography." The true handwriting analyst must be able to distinguish the differences between calculation and analysis by a "host of observations and inferences. ... It is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced" (164).

Although questioned document experts assure us that "handwriting exhibits identifying characteristics ... which enable it to be identified beyond a reasonable doubt" (Harrison, 288–291), mainstream psychologists have rarely studied graphology in America.

European Heritage

Graphology is a required or available course for graduate studies in a number of European psychology curriculums. Centers of learning that have offered or still offer courses in graphology include universities in England, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Consequently, most of the major developments in the field are European in origin. Trained handwriting analysts with advanced degrees in Europe can testify in court, although this practice was more prevalent before World War II. Klara Roman, a research associate to psychologist Kurt Lewin, had written her doctorate on graphology in 1928. Soon after, she became the authorized handwriting expert to the Royal Hungarian Criminal Court (Wolfson, in Roman, xiii). In the 1930s and 1940s, Rhoda Weiser, authority on the handwriting of criminals, became the "handwriting expert to the courts and police of Austria," and Max Pulver, who taught handwriting at the University of Zurich, worked in a similar capacity in Switzerland (Roman, 1962, 446). During this same era, Dr. Hans Schneikert held the chair in criminalistic graphology at Berlin University, and Captain Arthur J. Quirke, who was both graphologist and questioned documents examiner, was the handwriting expert to the Department of Justice in Ireland (Quirke, xi).

Today, important centers for graphology include the Moretti Graphology Institute at Urbino University in Italy, Leipzig University in Germany, the University of Barcelona in Spain, and graphology institutes in Zurich and Paris. Dr. Helmut Ploog, editor of Angewandte Graphologie und Personlichkeits Diagnostik, teaches graphology at the University of Munich. Ursula Avé-Lallemant, creator of the Star Wave test, has developed a grapho-diagnostic technique for children and adolescents that she has implemented in Switzerland, England, Norway, and Germany having been supported with a grant from the Bavarian Ministry of Education (1999, 120). Pierre Faideau, president of Groupement des graphologues-conseils de France, has edited the comprehensive textbook called La Graphologie. In England, Nigel Bradley has played a key role organizing conferences, editing proceedings, reprinting out-of-print classics, and helping to translate other works into English. In America, Patricia Siegel, president of the American Society of Professional Graphologists has brought many European graphologists to America to lecture, and Carole Schuler of the National Society for Graphology has condensed and transcribed every lecture given at that society for more than a quarter century.

The term graphology was coined by French clergyman Abbé Jean Hippolyte Michon, student of Abbé Louis J.E. Flandrin, who in the 1830s founded a school of handwriting interpretations with the Archbishop of Cambrai; this school became the source of modern graphology. After 30 years of empirical study comparing hundreds of known characteristics with various graphological signs, Michon wrote System de Graphologie, which is considered to be the first modern major treatise on the subject. Arthur Quirke once said of Michon:

Michon owes his status as the pioneer of graphology to the fact that he had an insatiable penchant for research. As a result, the amount of material amassed by him [has provided ample data ...] for a generation of subsequent investigators.

Each specific "element of the handwriting" or "sign" corresponded to a specific character trait, "and the absence of a specific sign indicated the lack of its matching trait." It was Michon who coined the word graphology from the Greek grapho meaning "to write" or "draw," and logos, which stands for "word" or "reason" (Saudek, 13). Paul de St. Colombe stated:

Ancient Egyptians held handwriting sacred, that as early as 1,000 B.C. in China and Japan, a rudimentary handwriting analysis was practiced. Japanese scholars of the time judged that character conformed to the way a man traced his bars according to thickness, length, rigidity or suppleness.

The science of handwriting analysis can trace its roots to antiquity. In ancient China, Confucius (551–479 BC) warned, "Beware of a man whose writing sways like a reed in the wind" (Rockwell, 4). "King Jo-Hau (1060–1180 AD) a philosopher and painter of the Sung Period declared that 'handwriting infallibly shows whether the scribe comes from a vulgar or a noble-minded person'" (Hatfield Holmes, 2006; Dolch, 2006). The Greeks also had graphologists. C. Suetonius Tranquillus wrote of Caesar in 120 AD, "He does not hyphen words and continue on to the following line ... but simply squeezes them in and curves the end of the line downward" (Jacoby, 17). Nevertheless, a full-bodied work on the science did not appear until 1622, when the Italian physician and professor of Theoretical Medicine from the University of Bologna, Camillo Baldi, wrote his treatise Method to Recognize the Nature and Quality of a Writer from his Letters. In this study, Baldi stated, "it is obvious that all persons write in their own peculiar way. ... Characteristic forms ... cannot be truly imitated by anybody else" (Jacoby, 18). He also pointed out the necessity of careful observation to mark down characteristics that tend to recur and to distinguish artificial from natural tendencies.

A century later, in the 1770s, Lavater wrote Physiognomic Fragments, which continued to expand the theory of handwriting interpretation. This was followed by the 1816 French text The Art of Judging the Soul and Character of Man by Studying His Handwriting by Edouard Hocquart. In 1820, Hocquart and Lavatar's colleague, Goethe, concurred by stating, "There can be no doubt that the handwriting of a person has some relation to his mind and character" (Jacoby, 20). Other early notables who practiced the art included Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, the Brownings, Disraeli, Sir Walter Scott, Ernst Mach, Baudelair, Balzaq, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Jean Crépieux-Jamin

It was Michon's student, Jean Crépieux-Jamin (1858–1940), son of a watchmaker and himself a dental surgeon who treated French and Belgian troops during World War I, who synthesized the work of his predecessors. Crépieux-Jamin abandoned the restrictive tradition of correlating each graphic sign to a specific character trait and the simplistic notion that if a graphological sign was missing, the corresponding character trait must be missing as well. Robert Saudek once said of him: "All knowledge of graphology is either based on ... or is derived from adaptions, imitations and plagiarisms of [Crépieux-Jamin's] works."

In 1888, Crépieux-Jamin published L'ecriture et le caractère (Handwriting and Character), in which he emphasized that handwriting must be analyzed as a totality with each trait contributing to the whole. In this way, he laid the groundwork for the Gestalt approach to graphological interpretation. "No modern graphologist would claim that any one graphic feature or 'sign' has in itself any fixed meaning" (Roman, 444). Credited as the discoverer of the theory of resultants that enabled the graphologist to deduce secondary qualities from the combination of known primary characteristics, Crépieux-Jamin created the framework for modern-day graphology, with his books as a primary source of all that was to follow. "The study of elements," Crépieux-Jamin wrote, "is to graphology as the study of the alphabet is to the reading of prose."

Writing about such related topics as the psychology of movement and sex in handwriting, Crépieux-Jamin founded the Societe Francais de Graphologie, and had his works translated into English as far back as 1892. A charismatic figure, Crépieux-Jamin remained the dominant French theoretician for more than half a century. A well-known figure at international European congresses, which were held until the outbreak of WWII, Crépieux-Jamin influenced Nobel Prize–winner/philosopher Henri Bergson; Pierre Janet; Alfred Binet, designer of the Stanford Binet IQ test; Jean Piaget, the well-known child psychologist; and Henri Pieron, who, working with Binet, conducted research on the topics of graphology and personality at the Sorbonne in Paris. Crépieux-Jamin's American translation also became the standard from which all other turn-of-the-century graphology textbooks had to be compared.

Criticism of Crépieux-Jamin

The Germans were initially sparked by the work of the French, who were their predecessors, but the Germans were more attuned to finding psychophysiological correlates to graphic signs found in the handwriting. Robert Saudek, a Czech who moved to England in the 1920s, in part to bring graphology to the English-speaking world, notes that although Crépieux-Jamin was "unsurpassed as a practical worker ... endowed with that faculty of sharp observation ... he reared a new edifice of crooked construction" (Saudek, 16–17). Crépieux-Jamin's methods were "inexact," because they were based on intuition and empirical study rather than on scientific analysis or biological premises. Further, Crépieux-Jamin saw the signature as an "autonomous product" unrelated to the handwriting, "a method quite suitable for graphological entertainment at a tea-party, but which renders impossible a scientific treatment of the subject. ... But in spite of this, pupils with an innate talent for psychology and graphology will learn more quickly from him than from the more thorough, more scientific ... but more cumbersome German authors" (16–17).

The German School

Adolf Henze, a contemporary of Michon's, caught the attention of the public when he published articles on graphology in a Leipzig periodical and published the book Chirogrammatomantie, which referred to teaching the characteristics and abilities of humans from the handwriting. Henze, who in 1855, was the first to introduce the word garland to refer to u-like movements in such letters as m's and n's, was followed by E. Schweidland, later professor of economics, who translated some of the work of the French for a number of pupils, particularly Wilhelm Langenbruch, who founded the first German graphology journal in 1895. The most famous contributor was Dr. William Preyer, a full professor of medicine from the University of Jena, who was well known for his work on the neuropsychology of language acquisition.

However, Langenbruch was soon eclipsed by Hans Busse, editor of the competing and more prestigious graphological periodical, Monthly Journal. Busse also translated much of the French work into German, and he also compiled an extensive bibliography of international literature on the subject, which helped Germany become the leader in theoretical and experimental graphology.

In 1879 came two important works, Albreacht Erlenmeye's Handwriting: Main Characteristics of its Psychology and Pathology, and Wilhelm Preyer's (1895) On the Physiology of Writing. These books established that handwriting was actually brain writing. By having writers perform with their opposite hand, their foot, and even their mouth, crucial similarities were displayed, which conclusively established that writing was centrally organized. Other German psychologists who studied handwriting for personality traits and psychopathology included Magdalene Ivanovic, who is credited with being the first to discuss the air stroke. Wilhelm Wundt, the father of modern-day psychology, and his associate Emil Kraepelin, "who attempted to measure pressure and speed in normal and mentally disturbed persons with his Kraepelin Scale" (Roman, 1962, 437). Kraepelin invented a method of measure that became the basis for psychiatry's Diagnostic Statistical Manual, the standard bearer for cataloging all mental disorders. Unfortunately, Preyer passed away at the age of 56 in 1897.

Ludwig Klages

Busse continued to edit Monthly Journal throughout the early 1900s. Two new writers of note emerged: Dr. George Meyer and Dr. Erwin Axel. Meyer's 1901 treatise, The Scientific Basis of Graphology, expanded on the Gestalt approach while noticing that "the intention of the writer is always manifest at the beginning of words, lines or sentences, whereas further text or ends of lines show the real nature of the unconscious of the writer" (Saudek, 22). On the other hand, Axel, who was unknown at the time, attacked Michon's work on fixed signs and Crépieux-Jamin's doctrine of harmony. He called for an end to unscientific suppositions and stated his belief that graphology should be based solely upon what can be proven. His premise sowed the seed for a scientific theory of expressive behavior. Notable proponents of this line of investigation include Robert Saudek, Gordon Allport, Werner Wolff, Thea Stein Lewinson, and Klara Roman.

Saudek (1926) informs the reader that it was not until a full decade later, in 1910, that Axel revealed his true identity: Ludwig Klages (23). A graduate from the University of Munich with training in physics, chemistry, and philosophy, Klages (1872–1956) was a brilliant characterologist who attempted to link the mystery of human existence and its psychophysical character to natural forces, and thus to the very pulsation of life itself. Klages realized that the dynamic relationship between contraction and release in handwriting, the interplay of up and down strokes, is manifested in its rhythm. Mentally healthy writers would display a natural balance between contraction (movements toward the body) and release (movements away from the body), whereas mentally disturbed individuals would display impaired rhythm.

Criticism of Klages

Eric Singer (1949/69), doctor of law from the University of Vienna and popular author of graphology books, both praises and criticizes Klages. Singer credits Klages as being "the first to create a complete and systematic theory of graphology." Klages was also the first to realize the link between rhythm, or movements of contraction and release, with theories of expressive behavior and characterology. However, according to Singer, Klages was unable to realize that opposite traits can exist in the same person. "Secondly, Klages' intellectualism, and his tendency to supercilious condescension in appreciating the achievements of the French" thwarted further development of the field. Klages only knew German script, and this was also a hampering factor, as was his inability to appreciate the work of Freud and psychodynamic theory, "and so he missed the connection between graphology and the modern psychology of the unconscious" (36).

Robert Saudek

Born in Kolin, Czechoslovakia, the graphologist Robert Saudek was also a diplomat for the Czech government. A playwright and novelist as well, his books include A Child's Conscience and Jewish Youths. Having studied graphology at universities in Prague, Leipzig, and at the Sorbonne, one of his life's goals was to bring scientific graphology to the English-speaking world. "During the First World War, Saudek maintained an Intelligence Unit in The Hague and at the end of the War in 1918 he entered the diplomatic service for the Czechoslovakian Government, serving in Holland before finally settling in London" (Senate House Library archives, University of London). In 1930, Saudek founded Character and Personality: An International Quarterly for Psychodiagnostics, the first major English language journal that routinely published articles on graphology. After he died, the periodical was taken over by Charles Spearman, a student of Wilhelm Wundt's, who was made famous for his groundbreaking work on human intelligence. Spearman, in turn, was the teacher of Raymond Cattell, who worked with E.L. Thorndike on theories of personality, and David Wechsler, designer of the widely used Wechsler Intelligence Test.