History
Hand writing analysis has been employed throughout history as a means of personality profiling and assessment. During the 2nd. Century Suetonius remarked on the tie between character and writing relating To The Emperor Caesar Augustus. In the 11th C. the Chinese philosopher Jo-Hau declared that "handwriting infallibly shows us whether it comes from a noble minded person or a vulgar one"; and in 1270 Roger Bacon twice mentioned handwriting as a personality indicator in his Compendium Studii Philopheiae. Writing continued to be the sphere of monks and scholars so it was not until 1622 that an Italian scholar and physician, Camillo Baldi of University of Bologna published a book entitled - Treatise on a Method to Recognize the Nature and Quality of a Writer from His Letters. Although, interest was raised by this book no real further work was undertaken until a book was published in 1778 by Johann Kasper Lavater, a scholar from the University of Zurich who stated that "everybody has his own individual and inimitable handwriting." He also proved that "the handwriting of a person is congruent with his actual situation and state of mind" and that "a remarkable analogy between the voice, gait, and handwriting of people" is apparent.
After this work a number of prominent writers, artists, and public figures became interested in the subject. But, it was to be a further 100 years before the Abbe Jean Hippolyte Michon coined the name "graphology" and produced two books entitled The Mysteries of Handwriting and the Practical System of Graphology. The study of handwriting became popular on the Continent during the end of the 19th C.;and at the beginning of the 20th C. Dr Ludwig Klages founded a theoretical school in Germany, Robert Saudek continued his research in Czechoslovakia and Max Pulver in Switzerland. However, it was only with the input of some of the psychological theories of Freud, Jung, Adler, Horney, Fromm, Maslow in the early part of the 20th C. that graphology finally began to have broader appeal.
There emerged 2 separate schools of graphology from these research studies, holistic or Gestalt graphology on the Continent and Graphoanalysis in the United States. In holistic graphology the analyst looks at an overall image of the writing and links it with theories of personality based in psychological theories; whereas in the States individual strokes in the handwriting are given meaning and used to determine personality. In this way a jigsaw is built of pieces which then form a picture. Some writing traits are common to both schools.
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