Diagnosis by Drawing

"Draw a picture of everyone in your family doing something." Those are the simple instructions that Psychiatrist S. Harvard Kaufman and Psychologist Robert C. Burns give to children sent to them for treatment. In their new book, Kinetic Family Drawings (Brunner/Mazel; $8.95) the two therapists show some of the kinetic, or action, pictures drawn by their young patients and explain how the crude art reveals more fully than thousands of words what is troubling the children.

The idea of evaluating the intellectual and emotional makeup of a child by analyzing his drawings did not originate with Kaufman and Burns. Ever since the 1920s, psychologists have been measuring intelligence by asking children to draw a person (the D-A-P test). For the past two decades, clues to children's emotional problems have been found in their drawings of a house, a tree and a person (the H-T-P technique). By requiring children to draw their families in action, however, Kaufman and Burns believe they have opened new avenues of investigation. In fact, they say, kinetic family drawings "tell us more than we can decipher."

Isolated Children. What the therapists find most intriguing are some of the recurring themes that reveal how children feel about their families. Kids who feel neglected will time and again draw their mothers cleaning house and their fathers driving off to work, while "tough or castrating" fathers are often pictured mowing the lawn or chopping wood. The cat, soft and furry but armed with claws --a creature symbolizing ambivalence --turns up frequently in pictures by girls who both love and hate their mothers.

Youngsters who feel isolated, like Mike, 17, frequently draw family members doing things alone in separate rooms instead of together. Mike also showed his mother at work in the kitchen with her back turned, and he drew himself " 'stealing' food (love) from the cold refrigerator." When they first took him to Psychiatrist Kaufman, Mike's parents insisted that the family was close. But they finally admitted to Kaufman what their son's drawings made painfully clear --that they "didn't give a damn what happened to Mike."

Sometimes children leave out of their pictures the very things that bother them most. Mary, 12, who had been raped by her brother, drew him sitting in a chair that concealed his body below the waist. Tim, 16, who suffered severe asthma attacks because he felt utterly unloved by his alcoholic mother, showed himself running after an elusive butterfly. On his picture he wrote: "Can't draw mother."

In a picture that the authors call typically oedipal, seven-year-old Tom drew himself as a powerful speedboat, dragging his naked mother behind him. Relegating his father and the dog to the reverse side of his picture, Tom saved "the whole front page for himself and his mother."

In another drawing, Billy, 14, revealed how he felt when his mother remarried. Her new husband had children of his own, and the family was polarized into two camps. Write Kaufman and Burns: "The boy must be aware of the sexual relationship between the stepfather and the mother, as the sword between the stepfather's legs is the largest weapon in the drawing." Billy, obviously jealous, drew himself throwing darts at his stepfather. The darts were very small and could do no harm; the boy must therefore have realized how powerless he was. That feeling of impotence, the authors say, may have accounted for Billy's "bad" behavior at home and at school.

"The ironing-board syndrome" is also a familiar motif in kinetic family drawings. Kaufman and Burns think it may represent the heat of mother love, longed for but dangerous. In what some therapists will consider a farfetched interpretation, the authors attribute the X shape of the ironing board's legs--and other X shapes in the drawings--to the child's X-ing out or saying no to his sexual impulses.

Allan, an adolescent who was sometimes terrified of being at home, showed in his drawing that he feared both his mother and his seductive eleven-year-old sister. He drew himself eating from a lunch box marked X set on a table with X-shaped legs, and he drew his mother behind the X of an ironing board. Barely able to cope with his impulses, he showed his sister holding up a stop sign to keep him away and his brother pointing a gun at him. The father was apparently of no help to his troubled son. Allan pictured him racing away in a speedboat.

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