History of Handwriting Analysis

From 322 BC to today people have commented and observed that people’s character is shown by how they write.

Aristotle observed “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men do not have the same speech sounds so do all men not have the same writing.” The Roman Emperor Nero pointed to a man in court and remarked that, “his writing shows him to be treacherous.” In the second Century, Tranquillis remarked about the peculiarities in the writing of Octavius Augustine.

Coming more up to date, the first book on handwriting analysis, “Treatise on a method to recognise the nature and quality of a writer from his letters”, was published in 1622 by the Italian scholar, Baldi, who observed that all persons have a recognisable characteristic way of writing.

In the 19th Century, Poe, The Brownings and Dickens were all handwriting analysts. The first practical system of handwriting analysis was developed in 1875 by Abbe Jean-Hippolyte Michon, known as the practical system of Graphology, thus coining the generic term of Graphology.

During the early 20th Century the Germans, Klages, Preyer, Meyer and Pophal all studied the analysis of handwriting, Preyer understood that handwriting is really a form of brain writing. In Germany handwriting analysis was regarded as a branch of applied psychology and graphologists were frequently consulted in the vocational and medical diagnostic fields.

By the 1920’s Americans, Downey, Bunker, Allport and Vernon had started to really understand that each individual stroke of the letters had a personality expression of their own and that the personality traits of the writer could be extracted from them. They also understood that in order to understand the whole personality each single trait had to be understood.

It was M. N. Bunker who founded the International Graphoanalysis Society in 1929, IGAS. IGAS is today the world’s leading organisation in handwriting analysis. For more information about IGAS go to: www.igas.com