Italian flag

Graphology and Psychology

SENTIMENTAL, EMOTIONAL AND SEXUAL PERSONALITY INCLINATIONS

Feeling inclinations are plainly related to a the psychic function in charge of yielding information about the values of things by means of its emotional undertones. Feelings tell us if something is pleasant or acceptable, if it is valuable for us. Thanks to such function, perception is impossible without a subsequent emotional reaction. Experience – from a subjective point of view – is characterized by a specific level of emotionality- more or less intense- and by the perception of pleasant/unpleasant setting in a subsequent polarity of refusal/attraction and separation/approach

Value assignment is patently an outstanding psychological function necessary to orientation and people detached from their feelings and from their emotional foundations suffer from a feeling of emptiness and the lack of a reference: actually, this emptiness is real, due to an overall personality impoverishment. The sense of Self – as Moretti guessed already while asserting that man foundations lie in his emotional facets – can be well-grounded only on truth and genuineness of feelings.

On the other side, it is not easy at all to have access to the inclinations of feeling in individuals, as feelings are what of more obvious exists inside us and- at the same time- they are a hard land to be explored, difficult to be seen objectively even in its conscious facets; while its obscure, unconscious side cannot be approached directly, as it is perceived as disturbing, illogical not relevant at all in the “rational” decision-making process. We do not know ourselves but superficially and are afraid of getting involved in strange, unusual situations, that can elicit unpredictable emotional responses we fear: this because they remind us of parts of ourselves we do not acknowledge and consequently choose to project outside ourselves.

Apparently, feelings are the most irrational and unpredictable issues and do not allow a truly scientific analytical approach; however, they follow basic inclinations of the human psyche which can be understood if the individual mind feels entitled to perceive them and therefore to recognize them as they are. Otherwise, the Ego can decide that feelings are wrong, not to be paid attention to, because they bring just death and desolation consequently giving way to inner dissociation.

From the point of view of analytical psychology, one of the main problems affecting our culture is negation, debasement and consequent lack of maturity of the sentiment function in individuals. This issue is not due only to objective troubles in discovering our inner world and in activating a gradual introspective path, but also to the fact that generally educational systems – based on acquiring specific cultural models aimed to adaptation – encourage people to become detached from their feelings and their emotional foundation and to favour the interpretation of their life experience according to such recommended mental models. Especially in the present age human beings live an excruciating contradiction between what they feel to be true and what they judge to be right: consequently, troubles ensue in the self-determination to action because – whenever such division is present – unavoidably each decision made leaves the Ego a feeling to have left out something really important.

Though it is commonly accepted that men are more inclined to ignore or suppress the values of feeling, women do not live a lesser conflict because-although they have generally a deeper awareness of what they feel-they hardly can accept to live their authentic feelings, setting the conditions where true feelings are always misrecognized, denied or removed.

A graphological approach to the study of the individual sentiment function starts from a few general psychological assumptions:

  • feeling inclinations are at the base of the individual personality, which uses them in a mostly unconscious way, showing its presence through several layers of emotions and rationalizations;
  • each personality structure is the expression of a specific model of availability and reactivity of feeling, that is, of the inclination to behave in a specific way, independently from the conscious contents that are expressed.

This structured motivational core connected to the value assignment affects directly the conscious part of the Ego, whenever the Ego ignores the existence of such part of itself or else- indirectly- if some self-consciousness is present. Actually, the conscious mind can interact with feeling inclinations in order to narrow, widen, mediate, retard, try to postpone, partly elude the feeling needs only if it can recognize them: elsewhere, it lives them automatically.

Moretti often used the word “feeling” according to its philosophical meaning, that is “contrary to reason”, assigning to the former absolute priority about human behavior’s determination.

However, this term will be used in a strict sense- more specifically in a psychological one- in this short introduction: that is, we are going to look for correlations between psychic inclinations as analyzed through graphological signs and subsequent ways of expression of individual sentiment, remembering that the distinction itself between sentimental, emotional and sexual inclinations still remains quite artificial as it represents a differentiation of the unique human need to relate to what is “other” from the Self, in order to support or expand the borders of the Ego.

This page has the following sub pages.