GRAPHOLOGY. - From γραφή (writing) and λόγος (discourse), its object of study is the investigation of the possible relationships that exist between an individual's handwriting and his nervous, psychic, and moral characteristics; according to some authors (early attempts by J. Chr. Grohmann and modern studies by G. Moretti), even the physical notes of bodily constitution; whence the possibility of knowing the entire personality through graphological expertise.
In the evolution of the theories and practical application of graphology, different interpretive concepts followed one another, both as regards the evidentiary value to be given by preference to this or that element of the graphic complex, and as regards their corresponding expert value, and as regards the power of revealing only the innate notes or also the acquired ones of the individual nature (v. CARATTERE E CARATTERIOLOGIA; INDOLE).
Graphological examination takes into consideration the numerous elements of handwriting, from the elementary graphic signs in their characteristics of form, slant, intensity of stroke, greater or lesser union or spacing between letters and words; to the particularities of alignment and direction of the line, of simplicity or harmoniousness or superfluity of design. Thus graphologists came to give a corresponding somatic and psychological value to individual signs, or rather, more modernly, to the graphic complexes constituted by their association or combination, complexes indicative of the affective-active dispositions, of the intellectual aptitudes, even of the morphological habit of the subject under examination. One of the most authoritative modern practitioners of graphology, Father Girolamo Maria Moretti of Recanati, of the Order of Friars Minor Conventual, in his treatise lists, describes, and critically studies the diagnostic value of seventy graphic signs, distinguished into substantial, modified, and accidental, each classified with regard to its own quantitative value by means of a personal decimal classification system. The individual tendencies and their different decimal value in combining would lead to the determination of the resulting personal psychology or psychographic picture.
As regards the more detailed exposition of the history, rules, and practical application of graphology, the reader is referred to the works cited in the bibliography, particularly to the more modern ones, developed in the form of treatises with a scientific approach.
As regards instead a judgment of the scientificity of graphology, and the consequent moral judgment of it, it should be noted that it is undoubtedly possible, on the basis of scientific physio-psychological arguments, to maintain the existence of well-defined relationships between the characteristics of the personality, understood in the broadest and most comprehensive sense, in the manner of the modern constitutionalist schools, and the various types of external language (v.) (mimic, phonic, graphic). Everyday observation and, in particular, the study of the individual in different conditions of health or of physical or psychic illness, shows corresponding modifications of gesture, of speech, of writing; the anatomo-physiological investigation of the nervous system brings out the presence of well-determined language, writing and mimico-facial centers, connected among themselves in structural relationships of correlation and collaboration (v. LOCALIZZAZIONI CEREBRALI: NERVOSO, SISTEMA). Just as it cannot be doubted that, understood of course in conditions of spontaneity, gesture and speech are personal to the individual and manifestations of his psycho-physical ego, so this must be held equally certain for writing. The practical point of the question remains the problem of the indicial value of the individual signs and of the extent and quality of what can be diagnosed from graphic signs. Therefore, while confessing faith in the scientific value of graphology, it is held that, as already in the course of its historical development, the future will have to make summary justice of much material currently considered good and will bring back within more modest but firmer boundaries certain practical conclusions which, on a truly critical examination, appear as artificial constructions set up in advance and which, even if in the hands of particularly able practitioners they come to coincide with reality, seem to derive more from a particular intuitive clairvoyance (v.) than from the application of canons deduced by scientific method.
Scientists of worth were attracted by its characteristics of seriousness and by the possibility of framing the study of graphology with scientific method and brought to it the contribution of their work; it will suffice here to recall A. Binet, Ch. Richet, C. Lombroso, E. Morselli.
From the aforesaid scientific bases of graphology derives the judgment that can be given of it from the moral point of view. Unless it wishes, for example, like chiromancy (v.), to overstep into the prediction of the individual's future free behavior, going beyond the reasonable generic forecasts of the individual's conduct, inferable from circumstances and from the its psycho-somatic tendencies, it absolutely cannot be catalogued among the so-called divinatory arts and occult sciences condemned by Sixtus V with the bull Coeli et terra of 5 Jan. 1585 (Bullarium Romanum, VIII, Turin 1863, pp. 646-50) and in the other ecclesiastical documents relating to divination and magic (v.) in general. For this reason its theoretical study and its practical application are morally licit, while it is to be hoped that it not be left in the hands of charlatans and empirics, but have as its only practitioners individuals of adequate competence in the biological, psychological, constitutionalist and medical sciences.
Bibliography11 works
Giuseppe de Ninno