OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE TRENDS

One characteristic of compulsive neurotics is that they feel an unreasonable need to repeat certain thoughts or acts, often of an apparently harmless and meaningless nature. In handwriting, too, compulsion neurosis betrays itself in such meaningless repetitions.

When asked why she repeated the i-dots, the writer answered that she did not know why, but could not help repeating them.

PERSECUTORY TRENDS

This paranoiac betrayed himself through blurred spots his script. (They look like corrections that do not improve anything, or should I call them smoke screens?) These blurred spots may be interpreted as the visible traces of the writer's temporary confusion or his unconscious attempt to obliterate his traces. For such blurred words, letters, syllables, figures seem to be produced during a passing loss of consciousness on the part of the writer.

Graphologically I would interpret the:

…split letter as: indicating a break with tradition, customs, and the socially acceptable--a split in the writer's intellectual world;

…decayed script as: indicating the undermining of the writer's image of the real world and the dissolution of his contact and communication with other people;

…wavering lines as: indicating the writer's confusion between conscious and unconscious, facts and hallucinations.

Oversimplified and incomplete as these interpretations are, they may serve as an invitation to experimental psychiatrists to look into these problems from the standpoint of expressive gestures. As a graphologist, I am not prepared to discuss the complete dynamic and genetic bases for these expressive signs and symptoms.

Examination for Lesson 16

1. What in Walt Whitman's script indicates that he suffered from heart ailment? 2. Anne Rutledge, (Lincoln's "true love") shows general weakness in her script. How is this known? 3. Nietzsche’s writing was originally clear. It became pastose, unclear, blotchy. What is indicated? 4. In which type of psychopath are the following true: leaves out one (essential) part of the story; one (essential) part is left out and a freely invented part is substituted for it; one (essential) part is left out and the gap is filled with something meaningless? 5. Characteristic of compulsive neurotics is that they feel an unreasonable need to----? 6. Constant writing "corrections" that do not correct is characteristic of which disorder? 7. Writing what kind of letter reflects a split in the writer's intellectual world?

Answers for Lesson 16

1. There are ‘breaks’ in letters, which if they were superimposed on a chart of the human body, would correspond to the area of the heart.

2. A considerable amount of her writing has almost no pressure.

3. It is a danger signal of possible physical and/or mental illness.

4. The habitual liar

5. Repeat certain thoughts or acts, often of an apparently harmless and meaningless nature.

6. Paranoia

7. A split letter

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