Gerry Langer

Many have commented on the oddity of Donald Trump’s huge and illegible signature.  When Trump announced his candidacy,  I was reminded of the time in about 1988 when his handwriting was analyzed by Felix Klein, a world-renowned  graphologist, author and court-recognized document examiner. It was during a master-level seminar that I attended in NYC while pursuing my doctoral degree in clinical psychology. I had become interested in graphology several years earlier after reading that it was taught in European and Israeli graduate-level psychology programs and used clinically and for business personnel selection.  I was further intrigued after learning how clinical projective tests, such as the House-Tree-Person and Kinetic Family Drawings Test, shared many interpretative similarities with gestalt handwriting analysis. Although children learn cursive using a standard writing form template (New York schools through the 1960's taught the Palmer Method or one of its derivatives), within a year or so most children's writing starts to differentiate from that model. These writing changes, which are unconscious symbolic representations, can reveal a person's developmental history, either positive, when their physical and emotional needs were met, or traumatic, if they were not.  Personality characteristics and subsequent behaviors are largely determined by our primal and childhood experiences, for better or worse.