Pen-and-Pencil Therapy

Dark words on white paper bare the soul.

-- Maupassant

Before D., an emotionally disturbed 18-year-old college girl, met Paul de Sainte Colombe, her handwriting looked like this:

That sample equipped De Sainte Colombe with all the clues he needed to diagnose the coed's distress. The tightly closed ovals -- in the O's and A's, for instance -- told him that she was deeply introverted. With particular concern, he examined the capital I's -- her references to herself. They were small (insecurity); some of them seemed crushed, fallen, unable to rise. Without seeing Patient D., De Sainte Colombe launched her on a course of therapeutic penmanship. For months, following his instructions, she practiced opening her ovals, elevating her base lines, crossing her Ts firmly, giving everything she wrote a uniform slant. Within a year, D.'s script was totally transformed:

The change in D.'s personality, claims De Sainte Colombe, was even more remarkable: her emotional balance was restored. "Just as the subconscious mind affects handwriting," he says, "handwriting can be used to affect the subconscious mind. It can reinforce our neuroses or eliminate them." On that premise he has built a successful, albeit somewhat lonely career in graphotherapy--the diagnosis and treatment of emotional problems through the pen.

Unlocking Secrets. The new specialty evolved from the older art of graphology, or handwriting analysis.

De Sainte Colombe's mentor was Pierre Janet, a respected French physician and psychologist. It had occurred to Janet, and one or two others before him, that if handwriting could reveal the secrets of the inner self, it might be possible to change the self by changing the handwriting. De Sainte Colombe, who moved to Hollywood from Paris in 1940, makes claims for his treatment that sound something like a patent-medicine label. Graphotherapy, he has said, can be used to treat introversion, unsustained will power, lack of self-confidence, excessive drinking or smoking, sexual disturbances, timidity, laziness, depression and emotional instability.

Supporters and Critics. He does all this, or claims to, by getting his patient to write in ways that promote positive values. Someone whose base lines waver (a sign of instability) or descend (depression, fear) is asked to practice running the lines upward on the page (optimism, ambition) until it becomes a habit. When that happens, De Sainte Colombe insists, the subconscious gets the message, and the undesired personality defect vanishes.

Like its parent, graphology, graphotherapy has many critics who equate it with such pseudosciences as phrenology and astrology. Both also have their advocates. At the Santa Clara County juvenile detention farm in California, Psychologist Ernest Bradford Smith has been analyzing the script of his charges for 15 years and says that he can now spot the delinquent by his handwriting. De Sainte Colombe is widely known among West Coast behavioral scientists, some of whom are impressed by his pen-and-pencil therapy. Tested at a number of institutions, among them California's Patton State Hospital and the Santa Clara Mental Health Center, his treatment has produced what Psychologist George Melzer calls "astonishing results." Says Dr. John Langdell, a psychiatrist at San Francisco's Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute: "I'm a little skeptical about the claims he makes for graphotherapy, but I am by no means ready to reject them either."

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