You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a heavy book and rather expensive, but it contains a most comprehensive survey of the various drawing tests in use at present, together with relevant validation studies and case material. It is well produced, on good paper, and with many excellent and most instructive reproductions of drawings and paintings.
I think this is a book which might prove valuable not only to the clinical psychologist but also to the analyst, and in particular to the analytical psychologist. Jung has long ago laid stress on the value for the psychotherapeutic process of encouraging the patient to draw and paint, so that he may relate himself actively to the symbolic process going on within him. For “… the concrete shaping of the image enforces a continuous study of it in all its parts, so that it can develop its effects to the full. This invests the bare fantasy with an element of reality which lends it greater weight and greater driving power … In this way something of the inestimable importance is won—the beginning of independence, a step towards psychological maturity.” Moreover, as Freud has shown, the patient who takes up pencil or brush, besides becoming more active in the analytical work, may also open the way to discoveries which verbal concourse alone might not always make accessible.
This volume is a good example of the possible advantages to both clinicians and experimentalists of collaboration and the interchange of ideas and methods. The influence of psychodynamic thinking on the experimentalist is evident throughout this book; in fact, the drawing technique as well as all other projective tests could never have developed without the psychodynamic formulations, and these tests become completely meaningless when lifted out of this context. In the case of the drawing test procedures, the experimentalist can repay some of his debt to the clinician by offering him a refined tool of analysis, leading his attention beyond a content analysis of the patient's productions to a mo