THERE ARE MANY “sciences” by which a person’s inner character may be determined from such outer manifestations as the shape of his skull, nose, hands, and so forth, or the manner in which he crosses his “t’s” and dots his “i’s.” Each of these alleged sciences has a literature of its own, running to many thousands of volumes, in some cases extending back to the ancient Greeks. Not until recent years, however, have attempts been made to place such studies on a sound scientific basis. A few pseudo-scientists, comparable to some of the men we have been discussing, have put in their appearance, especially in Europe, but their work does not lend itself to amusing or dramatic treatment. We shall, therefore, take only a fleeting glance at four of these dubious arts—phrenology, physiognomy, palmistry, and graphology.
Phrenology, when it was first advanced around 1800 by the Austrian anatomist, Francis Joseph Gall, aroused enormous public interest. Hundreds of phrenological societies sprang up here and there in Europe—later in England and America—with devotees who defended it with religious passion. Numerous periodicals flourished and died, of which the Phrenological Journal, edited in Edinburgh, was the most influential. And of course there were tons of books and pamphlets.
In essence, Gall and his disciples argued that human personality consisted of a number of independent, inborn mental “faculties,” each of which was localized in a part of the brain. The larger the size of each region, the stronger the faculty. Consequently, an examination of skull bumps would reveal a person’s character. Eventually, the Austrian government prohibited Gall from lecturing (on the grounds that his belief in the close connection between brain and personality violated religious dogma), but he continued to spread his doctrine in Germany and France. When he died in Paris, in 1828, a post-mortem revealed, curiously, that his skull was twice as thick as the normal—a fact which provoked many unkind witticisms.
During the nineteen century phrenology was widely accepted by intelligent people, particularly those inclined toward the occult. When Sherlock Holmes deduced from the large size of a hat that the wearer was “highly intellectual,” he was basing his deduction on a phrenological dictum widely current at the time. Alfred Russel Wallace, like Conan Doyle, became a spiritualist, and also a believer in phrenology. On one occasion, when he had a subject in a deep trance, he touched various regions on a phrenological model head. With each touch the subject responded by making facial expressions appropriate to the bump. It was not telepathy, Wallace writes, because once he thought he was touching one bump when actually his finger was on another. Nevertheless the subject made the correct response.
Walt Whitman was so proud of the fact that phrenology showed him well developed in all faculties, that on five occasions he published a chart of his own head bumps. Leaves of Grass is filled with phrenological terms. For years critics puzzled over such lines as, “O adhesiveness—O pulse of my life,” until they discovered that “adhesiveness” was a phrenological faculty having to do with the attraction of one soul for another. In some of his personal notes Whitman referred occasionally to “16” and “164.” For instance: “Always preserve a kind spirit and demeanor to 16. But pursue her no more.” Early critics who couldn’t believe that Whitman was homosexual used these references to prove his interest in women. It later turned out that 16 and 164 were sections in a popular book on phrenology, and had reference to the faculties of hope and acquisitiveness.
Modern research on the brain has, as most everyone knows, completely demolished the old “faculty psychology.” Only sensory centers are localized. The base of the brain at the back of the head, for example, is related to sight, and not, as Gall taught, to “philoprogenitiveness” —the love of children. As a pseudo-science, phrenology is almost completely defunct except for an occasional carnival fortune-teller. 1
Physiognomy, the art of judging character from facial features, goes all the way back to a treatise ascribed (falsely) to Aristotle. From the Greeks down to the present there have been divided opinions about whether the countenance expresses personality traits or, as Shakespeare wrote, “There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” The literature on physiognomy is vast and contradictory, with the most impressive works appearing in the Renaissance. A number of recent investigations, by competent psychologists, have yielded negative results. The shape of the nose, ears, lips, the color of hair and eyes, texture of skin, and other features seem to show no correlation whatever with mental traits.
Certain exceptions, however, must be made. These are cases where a persistent mental attitude, with characteristic facial expressions, has left an impress in the form of lines or set muscular features. A person who has felt gloomy for thirty years is likely to look gloomy, for example, or a person who laughs a great deal may develop strong mirth wrinkles about the eyes. Sociologists have pointed out that certain folkway beliefs—like the notion that red-haired people have fiery tempers, or that a jutting chin is a sign of determination—may tend to bring out those traits in children who have the appropriate physical features. If everyone expects a carrot-topped child to have temper tantrums, this may help produce them. As yet, however, very little attempt has been made at scientific studies along such lines.
The theory that criminals have characteristic “stigmata”—facial and bodily features which distinguish them from other men—was the theme of an elaborate quasi-scientific study by an Italian occultist, Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909). His statistical methods were so shoddy that the work soon passed into deserved limbo, but in recent years its underlying notions have been revived by Professor Earnest A. Hooton, of the Harvard anthropology faculty. In a study made in the thirties, Dr. Hooton found all kinds of body correlations with certain types of criminality. For example, robbers tend to have heavy beards, diffused pigment in the iris, attached ear lobes, and six other body traits. Hooton must not be regarded as a crank, however—his work is too carefully done to fall into that category—but his conclusions have not been accepted by most of his colleagues, who think his research lacked adequate controls.
The work of Dr. William H. Sheldon in correlating mental traits with body types (endomorph, ectomorph, and mesomorph) should also be mentioned in this connection. His books are highly controversial, but clearly not the sort suitable for discussion here. Nor are we competent to discuss the “Szondi test,” devised by Leopold Szondi, a Zurich psychiatrist. In this test, a patient is given a set of photographs of persons who represent eight major psychotic types. He picks out those he dislikes most and those he dislikes least, then his choices are carefully analyzed. The theory behind the test is that patients tend to like pictures of psychotics similar to themselves in facial expression, muscular tensions, and so on. If the reader is interested, he will find it all explained in Introduction to the Theory and Practice of the Szondi Test, 1949, by Susan K. Deri, who teaches the technique at Manhattan’s New School for Social Research.
Palmistry is another ancient art with a literature of unbelievable immensity. It is usually divided into two branches—chiromancy, which has to do with telling the future from the lines in the palm; and chirosophy, the art of reading character from the shapes of fingers, size of the “mounts,” and other features of the hand. In China there is a related art called pedomancy—fortunetelling and character reading from the lines and mounds of the feet—but so far this has made little progress in the tea rooms of the West. A few recent books have attempted to place chirosophy on a scientific basis —notably The Human Hand, 1943, by Charlotte Wolff, of the University of London, and several popular books by Josef Ranald. Their studies are interesting, but based on extremely shaky experimental methods.
Graphology, the art of reading character from handwriting, seems to have started in Italy in the early seventeenth century. Its modern popularity began in the mid-nineteenth, when the Abbé Jean-Hippolyte Michon, of Paris, worked out an elaborate set of “signs”—the shape of loops, form of “t” crosses, position of “i” dots, and more—which he related to specific mental traits. A great deal of subsequent research, chiefly European, has invalidated most of the Abbé’s “signs,” but there is some evidence that more general, or “gestalt,” features of handwriting may have statistical correlations with certain traits. It is reasonable to suppose, for instance, that a person who is lazy and easygoing is not likely to become suddenly animated when he picks up a pen, or that a neat and orderly person will, when writing a formal letter, produce an extremely disorderly looking page. Nor would you expect a thoroughly conventional type of person to develop highly eccentric ways of forming capital letters.
One cannot even positively rule out in advance, particularly in the light of depth psychology, the possibility that there may be subtle unconscious connections between certain mental attitudes and their symbolic analogues in handwriting. For example, a religious mystic might unconsciously express spiritual yearning by terminating words with flourishes which rise upward to an unusual height. From this point of view, handwriting is looked upon as a form of “expressive behavior,” like talking, walking, facial expressions, laughter, or shaking hands—and as such would be expected to have some connection with personality.2 Exactly how much connection, however, or what sort, is still far from satisfactorily demonstrated in spite of the many impressive studies which have appeared in recent years.
If the reader is interested in exploring this psychological borderland, a good reference is Klara G. Roman’s Handwriting: a Key to Personality, 1952. Mrs. Roman, a product of the Hungarian school of graphology, has been teaching the subject for several years at the New School for Social Research. Her book, like most books on graphology, has little to offer in the way of careful experimental verification, but it contains a good summary of recent studies, and is an excellent introduction to modern graphological theory. Attention should also be called to Diagrams of the Unconscious, 1948, a book stressing a Freudian approach to graphology, by Prof. Werner Wolff, of Bard Colleger.3
One of the major difficulties in all forms of character reading research is that no really precise methods have yet been devised for determining whether an analysis fits the person or not. Wide margins on a written letter, for example, are supposed to indicate “generosity.” Is there anyone who would not feel that such a trait applied to himself? People are generous in some ways and not in others. It is too vague a trait to be tested by any empirical method, and even good friends may disagree widely on whether it applies to a given individual. The same is true of most of the graphological traits. If you are told you have them, you can always look deep enough and find them—especially if you are convinced that the graphologist who made the analysis is an expert who is seldom wrong.
Here is a simple test to try on any amateur or professional handwriting analyst. Obtain sample scripts from twenty friends, all of the same sex and approximate age, and turn them over to the graphologist. When you receive his twenty reports, give them (without the handwriting samples) to someone who is personally acquainted with all twenty writers. Ask this person to pair each report with a name on a list of the twenty friends. If he matches them at random, the laws of chance would allow him one correct pair. Consequently, if his score is high—say ten or more correct pairs—you have an objective basis for assuming there is something to the graphologist’s ability. If the score is low, it strongly suggests the contrary.
This is the sort of testing which has been done in the past by a few psychologists, and usually with poor showings for the graphologist. Until a character analyst can consistently score high on tests of this sort, his work will remain on the fringes of orthodox psychology. The fact that millions of people were profoundly impressed by the accuracy of phrenological readings suggests how easy it is to imagine that a character analysis fits the person analyzed—provided you know exactly who the person is!
Closely related to modern graphology are a number of expressive behavior tests which have been developed by psychoanalysts. Jung and his followers place considerable emphasis on the study of pencil doodling, and analytical literature is filled with reports along such lines. Somewhat similar is the “draw a person test.” A patient is given a sheet of blank paper and told simply to “draw a person.” When the sketch is properly analyzed, it is supposed to provide valuable clues about the patient’s personality disorders. Karen Machover, of Kings County Hospital, Brooklyn, has done most of the pioneer work with this test, and teaches a course on it at the New School for Social Research. The “drawing completion test,” invented by Dr. Ehrig Wartegg of Germany, is along similar lines. The patient is given a set of squares, each containing a few meaningless symbols, and told to make eight drawings which incorporate the symbols in some way. The Drawing Completion Test, by G. Marian Kinget, of the University of Chicago, is a recent book explaining the technique. Drawing and painting have, of course, long been used by psychiatrists and analysts for diagnostic purposes. The literature dealing with the analysis of art produced by neurotic children is particularly extensive.
All these forms of expressive behavior testing—and new ones spring up every year4—are still in the experimental stage. It may be decades before adequate tests are devised for testing these tests. Until then, it is unwise to be dogmatic in labeling them either science or pseudo-science.