New Carriage

Item of interest: Children Draw and Tell: an Introduction to the Projective Uses of Children’s Human Figure Drawings. By Marvin Klepsch and Laura Logie. New York: Brunnel / Mazel, 1982.

Observation (of item): CDaT, as advertised in the title, is filled with psychological analyses of children’s drawings, almost all of which are unfailingly blunt: ”… motor problems…” “… in need of security and support…” “… terror of nurse and/or needle…” “… feels intellectually inadequate…” “Overall Impression: Insignificance, shyness, smallness….”

A selection of digitized images from the item: they can be found here on the New Carriage photostream.

Observation (of self): The above causes me to think: (a) “This is completely sad and heartbreaking.” (b) “I’m thinking of my own son right now, hoping to keep him from harm.” (c) “I don’t even want to consider the complications of this, I just want to love him, that’s all.” (d) “It’s sad enough that small children face the entire range of adult emotional anxieties, but why does it also seem sadder that children’s drawings ‘leak out’ their innermost feelings, and that these drawings can then be examined clinically?” And, subsequently: (e) “Why should that bother me?”

Additional, barely-related thoughts: (a) “I wonder how often innermost feelings leak out of adults?” (b) “Maybe a lot. Or maybe very infrequently. It’s probably hard to tell and depends on the person anyway.” (c) “Personally, I had to lose a lot of poker hands before I realized that, for me, the answer is: ‘a lot.’”

Sequence of observations and excerpts (random, of item):

• children’s pictoral depictions of human beings (either of themselves or others) are significant enough in the world of psychology to rate a special term: Human Figure Drawings. They can also be called HFDs.
• HFDs (according to CDaT) first attracted attention from psychologists in the early 1900s. Since then, the study of HFDs has yielded many different kinds of psychological tests, all with special names: (1) the “Goodenough-Harris Draw-a-Man Test”; (2) the “House-Tree-Person Test” (Koppitz, 1968); (3) the “Gesell Incomplete Man Test”; (4) the “Evanston Early Identification Scale” (EEIS); and (5) one part of the “Denver Developmental Screening Test.”
• “A three-year-old typically draws a person as a head…” (14).
• “Four-year-olds make tadpole-like drawings…” (14).
• “At five years of age, most children will draw a body and a head. The head will contain eyes, a nose, and a mouth, and arms and legs will emanate from the body” (14).

Promotional blurb on back of a VHS case for the movie Sodom and Gomorrah. (Found at: video & seminar room, Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.)

Sodom and Gomorrah. Two cities built on barbarous cruelty and ruled by unspeakable vice. Sweeping off the pages of the bible, and brought to life by a cast of thousands, this breathtaking, epic production paints a vivid and shocking portrait of the cities too wicked and sinful to survive. It’s the story of Lot (Stuart Granger) who led the Hebrews out of the desert to these twin cities of sin, and into temptations no man or woman could resist. From bloody battle and sadistic torture to savage passion, it’s an action-packed story of shameless corruption of the flesh and spirit that leads to an awesome climax, as God’s fury is unleashed in one of the most gripping cinematic sequences of destruction ever created. Directed by Robert Aldrich in 1963, the star-studded international ensemble features Anouk Ami and Pierre Angelli. One hundred forty eight minutes, color, nineteen sixty three.

From Drinking and Intoxication, edited by Raymond G. McCarthy; The Free Press; Glencoe, Illinois: 1959.

Much interesting work was done on [drunkenness] in the 19th century, and quaint theories persisted even then. Robert McNish, a member of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, in 1835 in a book Anatomy of Drunkenness, discussed the peculiar phenomenon of spontaneous combustion of drunkards, a condition which, he claims, is well documented and in which the whole body, starting with the viscera, is burned in a few hours by a combustive process which for some reason does not even singe the surrounding furniture.

From Advanced Techniques of Hypnosis, by Melvin Powers, 1973.

More here….