Freud’s handwriting analysis

Freud’s handwriting may be surprising if referred to the cliché of the founder of psychoanalysis silently listening to his patient lying on the sofa and sitting behind him not to interfere anyhow with the free flowing of images and memories coming from the unconscious of the patient undergoing analysis.

Handwriting sample: Sigmund Freud

In fact, his whole handwriting suggests the image of a direct, strong interpersonal interaction, based on a deep need of connecting with others (Forward Slant) through an unending search for provocations (Sharp) to elicit a response and consequently the opening up and manifestation of the Other, either a patient, a colleague or an enemy. Therefore, to be silent and let the other talk was, for him, very difficult, as Freud patently belongs to the Assault Temper: his personality is characterized by the sign Sharp fully yielding its three requirements of angularity, narrow letters and tall letters, suggesting a sharp intelligence and drive to contradiction, appearing in a noteworthy recklessness and passionate way (Rushing).
His intelligence is highly original (Methodically Uneven) and therefore capable of deeply creative intuitions also in a psychological field (Sinuous), where it is powerfully rooted. Intuition proceeds according to the sharp intelligence’s typical way, therefore “going to the truth by means of sampling, contradicting, discarding, sorting“(3) and this tortuous way of proceeding strengthens his memory because this subject assimilates results through fight (Sharp, Forward Slant). Actually, “always the sharp intelligence infers and by inferring, it comes to know the truth and, sometimes, more sophisticatedly than a deep intelligence, as it has worked more and learned nothing but through a form of control I could almost define petulant.”. (4)
Freud’s mind does not belong to a rational, clear-minded scientist, but to somebody feeling the power in his own intuitions and defending them in any possible way (A Angles and B Angles above average); though he does not possess the ability of net linking, therefore his intuitions remain isolated and cannot be connected in a theory. Graphologically, the intuitive scientist who, like Freud, can single out the wonders in an issue of reality, may also become a theorist, therefore connecting his intuitions in a wider context only whether his gaze is deep enough to embrace the multiple issues of an observed phenomenon (Wide letters above average) and an adequate power in critical thinking (Spacing between Word above average). Both these requirements do not belong to Freud’s intelligence, which consequently remained highly unilateral regarding his psychological view of man. As for woman, later, he sincerely admitted that this one remained a continent totally unknown to him.
May be somehow surprising that this bright investigator of the unhealthy human mind had himself such an unquiet personality (Sharp, Rushing), so contaminated by irrationality (dark, Off-and-on Carved I, Flourishes of Mythomania) almost to the limit of being himself overwhelmed by his drive to contradiction so strong and immediate (Sharp, Forward Slant, Rushing), by his emotionality, by his need to be always, anyway, right (A Angles, Off-and-On Carved I) to the point to exhaust his own physical resources (not to mention the others’), because his personality is always set on self-defence, as the whole world, by means of projection, reflects on him this drive to contradiction and attack he has to defend himself from, but really belongs to him.
In many ways, we can say Freud could investigate the world of irrationality because he felt its power and charm, he joined it. As his intelligence was sharp, therefore more interested in pointing out the negative side of the observed phenomena, he saw it as a destabilizing and ominous world against which we have to defend ourselves: on the contrary, Jung with a totally different personality, perceived it as a numinous world capable of nurturing, with its powerful symbols, the small rational core of the human mind.
But in order to explore the unconscious world, somehow we have to be prepared to experience it directly, meaning actually either to allow us to live up this experience, in the case of a better balanced personality, as in Jung, or to live it so deeply ourselves to be utterly incapable to deny it, as in Freud; and in his unrelentingly materialistic point of view we can see his desire to bring reason and order to the human psyche and to dominate the obscure forces he felt inside himself and were to be brought to light through the strictly defined-in order to control the unconscious- therapeutic practice he had elaborated.
These were the banks he had built, and without them the explorer in him, who already risked so much in this journey searching for his obsessions, believed it was utterly impossible to proceed in such an unfriendly and dangerous ground, in danger to be invaded by the pool of powerful instincts his sharp gaze already noticed.