Chapter One : Graphology
Graphology
The study of handwriting analysis is known as graphology. Graphology relies on the expressive nature of a person's handwriting as a means of gaining insight into his or her character, personality traits and special qualities.
Graphologists have assigned a meaning to each and every pen-stroke variation. Since the handwriting of each individual is unique, graphologists can reach their conclusions by analyzing the individual differences in the writing. The likelihood of two people having identical handwriting is one in 68 trillion.
Applications
There are many ways in which graphology has proven itself useful: the study of child development, career placement services, psychological counseling, jury screening, criminology, compatibility assessments, the diagnosis of disease, the determination of levels of intelligence, the assessment of substance abuse, company personnel tests and many more applications.
It is important to note, however, that there are some things that handwriting analysis will not reveal. It cannot, for example, be used to determine the age of sex of the subject. In order to make an accurate analysis, a graphologist will need to know this information in advance.
Graphology must never be confused with clairvoyance. Graphologists are neither fortune-tellers nor prophets. It is absolutely not possible to predict a person's future by examining his or her writing. Handwriting analysis only reveals information about a person's present and past self.
It is also crucial to understand that, while graphologissts can extract very precise character profiles from writing samples, each of us makes slight changes in our writing depending on how we feel at the moment of writing; emotions, moods and external circumstances--such as where we are, what writing instruments we are using, what we are writing about and to whom we are writing--can precipitate changes in our writing styles.
Despite these inconsistencies, a well-trained graphologist can determine a startling amount of information about a person through his or her writing. This knowledge is two-fold; about the subject's external self (how one wishes to be perceived) and about the subject's inner self (who one really is).
The History of Graphology
Aristotle, a Greek philosopher who was born in 384 BC and was known as one of the greatest thinkers of all time, is believed to have said: "Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience, and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same speech sounds, so all men have not the same writing."
The next piece of documented historical evidence of graphology is from the year AD 120, when a Roman historian of the first twelve Caesars, Suetonius Tranquillus, distrusted the Emperor Augustus based on a sample of his writing. Tranquillus was quoted as saying: "He doesn't separate his words--I do not trust him."
During the 11th century, Jo-Hau, a Chinese philosopher, stated: "Handwriting infallibly shows us whether it comes from a vulgar or noble-minded person."
The earliest publication on the subject of graphology is thought to have been "Ideographia," a book written by an Italian scholar named Aldeius Prosper in the early 17th century. A few years later, also from Italy, came Camillo Baldi's "How to Judge the Nature and Character of a Person from His Letter." During this same period, a group of French clergy pursued serious studies of the relationship between handwriting and personality.
Interest in graphology seems to have waned after this point, and it was more than two hundred years later when a Frenchman named Jean Hippolyte Michon began to study the work done by these clergymen. Michon gave the field of graphology its name in 1871---"Graph" being Greek for "writing" and "ology" being Greek for "the study of."
Late in the 1800s a group of German scholars grew interested in determining the accuracy of handwriting assessment depending on whether the writing was spontaneous or deliberate. Dr. Ludwig Klages, a German philosopher, concluded from his research that graphologists were consistently accurate only when the writing sample provided by the subject had been written in a spontaneous fashion.
In 1897, Dr. Klages was a pioneer in the establishment of the German Graphological Society, which delivered a month publication devoted to new findings in the field of graphology. A few years later, Klages was responsible for a major schism between French and German graphologists resulting from fundamental differences in their interpretation of basic rules of handwriting assessment.
In the early 20th century, graphology arrived in the United States; thirty years later, it appeared in England. Since then, it has gradually begun to receive a new respect as a reliable means by which to determine important insights into a subject's personality and character. While the evolution of graphology in the United States has been slow, it has nonetheless been steady.
