Pen & Pencil Therapy

In France, where analysis of a man's character from his handwriting is considered a science, Raymond Trillat has risen to the top of his field. He has built up such a large practice that 300 firms now call on him to describe the characters of job candidates from the squiggles they make on application blanks. But back in 1946 Trillat began a second career. "If you can study someone's handwriting and deduce ideas about his character," he reasoned, "why can't you reverse the process? By modifying his handwriting, perhaps you can modify his personality."

Strings & Circles. An associate of the Psycho-Pedagogic Center of the University of Paris, Trillat has since won the support of doctors, teachers and psychologists for his success in clearing up mental disturbances in children by changing their handwriting. Last week he was in the Paris suburb of Levallois, putting 28 pupils through their paces in what seemed to be an ordinary class in penmanship. But whether he told a pupil to keep on making long strings of , or to concentrate on such rounded letters as a, b, and g, he always had his reasons. At 47, Raymond Trillat is known in Paris school circles by a high-sounding and eminently respectable title: grapho-therapist.

When he first began his experiments with children, Trillat found that many of their inner problems showed up clearly in their writing. The introverts had difficulty connecting their letters; the timid tended to squeeze all theirs together. Gradually, Trillat concocted a set of corrective exercises designed to give children a sense of "continuity, creation and equilibrium." In overcoming a defect in any one of these elements, said he, a child must first develop a feeling for rhythm, melody and harmony.

Plaits & Sedatives. Trillat found that many neurotic children, some of them stutterers, could not follow through. "There were children who couldn't even open a door with a single gesture. They would pull it in a series of hesitant, jerky movements." Such cases he starts out with a series of connected , then has them to variations ". For the particularly nervous he designed special "sedative exercises" ^TW^, and for the unstable, a series of plaits to develop "continuity in a discontinued movement." Those who squeeze their letters practice broad, sweeping motions , and those who spread their letters too much through lack of a sense of harmony must develop a consciousness of space and balance by each child is encouraged to find his own creative personality by forming his letters individually, and to develop equilibrium by slanting his writing in one direction and making his letters all one size.

In ten years Trillat has treated more than 600 children, claims to have cured or helped at least 500. All too often, he has found, emotional problems lead to illegibility, and illegibility leads to more emotional problems. Like remedial reading, says he, grapho-therapy does not change the basic personality; it is merely one way to break down certain kinds of emotional barriers. "In many cases," adds one Paris expert, "freeing children from the restrictions imposed by the fact of having to write can contribute to emancipating them from deeper problems and help their personalities to blossom."

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