As you can see, I have terrible handwriting. I’ve always wondered: if I hadn’t grown up in the computer age, would my scrawl be different? I started using a computer at age five (MS-DOS and its ilk) and I’ve never stopped. I worked my way along with all of the new family computers, all the incarnations of Windows, the Internet, the chat programs, and e-mail. I learned to type in order to use computers to make assignments look presentable. These days, I spend about a third of my time in front of the computer: I do seven e-mail checks a day, I read all the news online from at least four different sources, and I chat with whoever happens to be online on MSN.
When I came across the chance to interview a graphologist-someone who studies handwriting in order to understand personality-I couldn’t turn it down. For me, my handwriting is a special code, indecipherable to the rest of the world. It’s some ancient Sumerian technology I revert to when there are no keyboard-based devices around. If the experts can analyze this, they can analyze anything.
North American psychology has had, to put it politely, an attitude of skepticism toward graphology, and I have to admit some skepticism myself. But my handwriting analyst, OISE researcher Annette Poizner, had some illuminating things to say about my twitch-and-shake handwriting. For her, reading between the lines isn’t just a metaphor; it’s a science.
Poizner has solid credentials in helping people: a Masters of Social Work from Columbia University, Doctor of Education in counseling psychology from OISE, and she is a co-director of the Milton H. Erickson Institute of Toronto. But she simply calls herself a clinical social worker.
It is her experience in learning about Jewish mysticism in Israel that introduced her to graphology. Graphology has actually existed in many world cultures for centuries. Chinese medicine, for example, makes use of it. Alfred Adler, a famous psychologist, once said, “A man’s lips may be silent but he chatters with his fingertips.” In spite of all this history, our present-day culture seems to want to reject it.
So did I, at first. When I called her up, Poizner told me exactly what I had to write by hand: a description of a particular day in detail, three signatures, my birth date, two drawings of trees, and 10 early childhood memories.
‘I knew it,’ I thought to myself. ‘The handwriting isn’t informing her; it’s all the stuff I’m saying about myself. If she was really using my handwriting, I should be writing gibberish and she should just infer from that.’
Poizner’s response: “In psychology we use a method called ‘triangulation.’ We use different tests to converge on the same themes.” Handwriting alone is informative, she said, but so are childhood memories, how you perceive a day, and how you sign your name.
The handwriting itself turned out to be the biggest part of her analysis. When she began outlining what she’d concluded about me, it sounded as if a description of my handwriting was a description of me.
“We are looking at someone very angular,” she said. “Think about what an angle is,” she said, cutting one in the air with her hands, “it’s breaking a line. You are directing ideas, information into parts just like you direct the line into different parts.” She also said that angular writing combined with small letters is literally difficult to write. It takes a lot of energy because I put a lot of effort and concentration into what I write and, more generally, into everything I do, she says.
So that’s why my hand cramps during lectures.
The next step in graphology to take the findings in the handwriting and relate them to the whole person.
Poizner explains, “In psychology, we always think about a continuum. There are two extremes, and for optimal health you have a bit of both.”
The continuum she used for my example was the “splitting and bonding” continuum. Splitting, she said, implies multiplicity, diversity, and movement. It is the independent thinking personality also known in the yin-yang equation as the masculine. Bonding is the opposite: it denotes concentration, focus, and grounding by a quality of sameness relative to others-the feminine.
Excess of either is a problem: an overly splitting personality will take you forward without a feeling of inner strength, whereas an overly bonding personality will leave you lethargic with a lack of energy. She quotes Alexandre Dumas: “Every virtue in excess becomes a crime.”
“You tell one story very loudly in everything you’ve written,” she told me. “You’re a splitter.”
I can’t really argue with her. Pretty much everything she was describing was right on the mark, including the fact that I am always trying to be more balanced: I print my letters separately, but sometimes I try to be more connected. A crossed “t” of mine leads into the middle of the next “e”, for example.
She recounted an ancient Chinese belief that a boy has to enact his “inner feminine” to become a real man. Popular opinion in Western psychology dismisses these ancient beliefs and methods.
The way our society is moving, both sexes are becoming splitters, Poizner said, and our movement away from handwriting to the keyboard isn’t helping us achieve balance.
An editorial in the May-June 2000 American Handwriting Analysis Foundation Journal criticized educators who say, “We don’t need to teach handwriting-we have computers.” They cite Savina Serpieri, Vice-president of the British Academy of Graphology, who asserts that hand writing stimulates left-brain activity “and is central to developing the functions of self control-planning, monitoring, reviewing, revising, organizing, and attending (focusing/paying attention).”
Poizner believes that handwriting isn’t being replaced by the computer, just as books haven’t been replaced by the computer.
“There is something intrinsic and personal in handwriting that we don’t want to let go of.”
I know my handwriting has been aesthetically crippled by the computer, but I never really thought that I was losing my identity in Times New Roman. In fact, I’m starting to like the idea that these old chicken scratches of mine tell you that I’m me and I write like no one else.
For more, see www.annettepoizner.com
