The History of Graphology

The social person has the ability to meet a vast number of people in a vast number of occupations. One might even run into a graphologist in Las Vegas. Though you may never have heard of graphology or know what a graphologist does, the history of graphology stretches back (tentatively) to the late 1500's. A psychiatrist named Jean-Charles Gille claimed that Juan Huarte de San Juan's book Examen de ingenios para las ciencias was the first to broach the topic in any real way while many in American graphology credit Camillo Baldi's text Trattato come da unaletteramissivasiconoscano la natura e qualitadelloscrittore, published in 1622, to be the first.

Simply put, graphology is the study and analysis of handwriting. A well-trained graphologist should be able to not only identify a particular writer, but even be able to state the writer's psychological state while writing a particular piece. The trained graphologist can even derive personality traits from writing samples through the patterns and characteristics exhibited within the text. By reading and studying a text, a graphologist can infer many things about the writer based on the movement of the written word (the slants, spacing, and angles), the pressure of the writing instrument, and the shape of written strokes.

Graphology didn't really take root for another 250 years. In 1871, Jean-HippolyteMichon found himself enthralled by the idea and created a social group around the topic that he named SociétéGraphologique. From this group emerged a group of disciples, namely Jules Crepieu-Jamin, who continued the research well into the 20th century where it continued to be a subject of academic interest. Alfred Binet picked up the mantle and called it "the science of the future" despite having his findings rejected by other graphologists.

After the First World War, graphology once again surged in popularity within Europe and, eventually, in the United States as well. Through this surge came more academic experimentation with the previous theories and more groundbreaking work from people like Ludwig Klages, Thea Stein Lewinson, J. Zubin, and Milton Bunker.

Milton Bunker's work, however, split the world of graphology into two separate theoretical camps: graphoanalysis and holistic graphology. The differences between these two schools of thought can be viewed at the micro and macro levels: where graphoanalysis focuses on the writing strokes found within a text in order to create an analysis of the writer, holistic graphology takes every bit of the writing into account (writing pressure, slant of writing, etc.) and looks at the entire text as a whole before coming to any kind of conclusion about the writer's personality or state of mind.

Today, it's not uncommon to find a graphology test being utilized by psychologists to determine the scholastic or career-oriented aptitude of high school-aged kids. There are also many companies across the globe that employ graphology as a means of screening potential candidates for employment on top of doing in-person interviews. It's also not unheard of for graphology to be used as choosing managers within a company, other kinds of corporate training, security checking, career guidance (for those unsure of what industry they should be in), compatibility assessments for potential lovers, historical profiling in regards to historians and genealogists about past documents, or for even assessing forgeries and faked documents currently being created.

Graphology is an interest-piquing science that, with enough training, allows for anyone to become an adept and educated graphologist. Considering how many people actually still write notes and letters, you'd be fortunate to run into a well-trained graphologist in Las Vegas. Maybe they'd analyze your handwriting and give you some fun results about yourself in the process.

Source : articlesbase.com