Graphology

Abstract

Personality assessment is serious business. It goes on all the time and involves everybody from the Prime Minister to modern Miss Telephonists of 1969.  Because of its intangible nature people search for tangible systems to define it. The way a woman wears her face, a man his laugh, the way we act, talk and write, help to form some sort of register, permanent or hopefully immutable. People like to know most things about most other people. I just don’t understand you, sighs a puzzled lover; a disillusioned contemporary looks to the bottom of his beer mug for support. Both clutch at any technique that offers to crack the code of those that matter to them.

Graphology has struggled hard with its metamorphosis from art to science. If the ecdysis is not yet complete it is not for want of trying. The approach in graphology has been modified from an artifical and laboured point by point analysis of handwriting, the "school of fixed signs” of Michon , to a wider assessment of the traits and general forms inherent in writing. Pulver, Kraeplin and Klages, Allport, Vernon and Saudek, Roman, Lewinson and Zubin, these are the names that have introduced a commonsense, rhythmical and balanced line to handwriting analysis. While not entirely acceptable, it is intriguing and full of promise. Inevitably the subject finds itself variously ascribed to a booth along with Mme . Lizandra and her magic ball, phrenologists, homeopaths and cocktail party astrologers, or to the laboratory with psychometrists, forensic scientists and employers. It is not an entirely happy resonance.