The Great and their Handwriting

Presenting a graphological section characterised by such a generic title requires some explanation.

Firstly, who are the great: great scientists, great artists, great leaders, truly characterised by great intelligence or only by a great ambition and great scheming ability? Even this first question would require a long series of considerations that go beyond the purpose of this section.

Secondly, one asks whether it is legitimate to start from the apparently obvious supposition that a person became exceptionally famous due to the exceptional abilities he possessed, which in a finalistic sense drove him in a given direction. Graphologically speaking this is not always true.

Furthermore, this form of psychological reductionism is occasionally too pedantic and even irritating in the struggle to explain in detail how and why everything happened, without managing in the least to explain the height and the complexity of the situations to which certain figures reach.

Recently, the American psychologist J. Hillman revived the concept of Soul's Code, which is to say the idea "that each person carries an individuality that asks to be lived and which is already present before it can be lived." (The Soul's Code, 1996)

Everything that we are, in this point of view, is not the result of circumstances, the environment, or the character that we inherited, but these are only the instruments that stir the perception of the individuality of our destiny and contribute to its realisation.

In graphological terms, handwriting does not explain our destiny and only partially explains our history, in that the personality constitutes one of the means through which individual destiny is fulfilled.

In this sense the soul chooses to live its life, to have that particular experience of reality, through a certain body and a certain personality which are able to cope with this experience. For this reason an adventurer who discovers an unknown continent cannot have the same personality structure which allows another to spend his years painting frescoes in a chapel: beyond what may be the intellectual potential of both of them, one requires daring, restlessness and resourcefulness in order to move in practically infinite spaces and the other a total domination of his energies in order to complete his task under conditions of practically physical immobility. But these tendencies are instruments, not ends, in that the personality cannot explain itself, but appeals to another that remains outside of itself: the sense of one's own vocation, or rather that there is a reason for which one lives and, as chance would have it, it has precisely that personality structure that allows us to live those, and only those, particular experiences.

In relating the personalities of the great and famous we shall limit ourselves, therefore, to noting the psyche's structure by highlighting the principal graphological signs, and above all those that have obviously 'marked' by their presence, or their absence, or their disequilibrium, the individual under examination. But while we investigate what the individual shows of himself through the personality structure, we cannot forget what is not there and cannot ever be present in the handwriting: that which has given necessity and direction to that existence.

This page has the following sub pages.