Ursula Avé-Lallemant, the prominent German educational graphologist and psychologist, will celebrate her 90th birthday on Dec. 18th. This event culminates a highly creative, daring and productive career, combining diligent research with deep new graphological insights, based on a wide-scope of psychological and philosophical knowledge. She was thus able to create professional standards which should serve as a model for future graphological work. For our colleagues complaining about the lack of financial means hindering professional research, it should be mentioned that her life-long project was supported by curiosity, enthusiasm and love alone. (see Note 1)
Avé -Lallemant has created a revolution in the framework of graphological thought by establishing a new concept of developmental Graphology, based on her humanistic-existential theory of personality growth, and supported by research of norms and experimental data based on more than 10,000 handwritings. Her studies were the first to search the graphology of crises situations, whether as a developmental stage in puberty and adolescence, or as a result of life events. Her discovery of “Signs of Distress” enabled answers to the otherwise unanswerable question of “State or Trait” in personality evaluation.
Having performed a length-survey of children aged 6-20, Avé -Lallemant established the normative dynamic changes that specify the various developmental stages. Her major discovery is the temporary loss of stroke-elasticity during puberty. This facilitated proof that Klages’ and Wieser’s deterministic and bio-centric attitudes, namely of a constant inborn “Formniveau” or “Ground-rhythm” - portraying the permanent value of writer’s overall personality, could not hold true, and this was the leading finding in establishing her “Dynamic Graphology”. At the beginning, these revolutionary ideas were not well-received by the German graphological community, and it took many years until the major journals consented to publish her articles and her new approach was finally accepted and praised. Her main contribution is in viewing not only the graphic phenomena themselves as dynamic (well established in German graphology by the concept of expressive movements) but also the handwriting of an individual as a dynamic process, as well as the human personality as a dynamic entity at any given moment. She established well-defined and expected developmental patterns, explanations for deviations and graphological procedures for all these viewing points.
This intriguing method describes the growth of personality, layer by layer (the seven aspects), as interplay of inborn potentials and the freedom of their expression, and discusses disturbances hindering it. She suggested a three-phase pathway from a stable childhood, through the crisis of puberty to a new stabilization in adolescence and adulthood, and developed a new graphological approach to each, based on her model of personalty growth, adding more and more personality aspects with age. Unlike many theoreticians, she supplied large-scale field-studies to prove her anthropological and psychological theories.
Avé -Lallemant wrote a three-volume thick masterpiece describing her research and resulting theory of the Dynamic Graphology, in which she also studied the graphic expression of young criminals. Moreover, she has written books on alarm-signals in children’s handwriting, on the crisis of puberty as expressed in handwriting, as well as many articles.
Further she intensively stressed the fact that in psychological assessment “one test is no test”, suggesting the necessity of what she established as “The small Graphic Test Battery”, as a standard procedure in every graphological consultation. The battery includes handwriting, the Tree-Test, the Wartegg Drawing Completion Test and a new and genial test she herself has invented and researched, the Star-Wave Test. She dedicated a book to each of these tests and devised a new classification for the pencil-stroke analysis.
The Star-Wave Test is as an achievement test for children from age 3 onwards, and a personality test for all age groups, which can be considered as “graphology in a nutshell”. Its instruction to “Draw a starry sky over ocean waves” on a form on which a given rectangular frame is marked, enables to clearly separate Heiss’ three Pictures of Handwriting (Movement in the waves, Form in the stars and Space in their arrangement within the frame). It also provokes the innermost archetypal presentations, thus approaching depths that are usually untouched by handwriting, yielding crucial knowledge about the existential experience of the test-taker.
Avé –Lallemant inspired many graphologists worldwide and has also established and chaired for many years the “Verein der Dynamischen Graphologie in der Graphodiagnostic (VDGP)”, which continues her work. Some of her publications were translated into many European languages, as well as Hebrew and Japanese. The English reader is certainly at a disadvantage in this respect. Let us hope that more translations and projects based on her original work will be published, so that this exceptionally broad and important body of knowledge will become available to all graphologists.
Avé-Lallemant, U (1994, 2nd ed) Der Wartegg - Zeichentest in der Lebensberatung. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt.
Ave-Lallemant, U (1994) Graphology of infant and juvenile age as a tool for psychology, in: Cristofanelli P. and Lena S. (eds) Orientamenti della grafologia contemporanea, pp. 101-107.
Avé-Lallemant, U (1993) Graphologie der Jugendlichen, Vol. 3: Straftäter in Selbstausdruck. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt.
Avé-Lallemant, U (1988, I) Microstructure and macrostructure of handwriting in cross-cultural graphology, in Carmi, A (ed) Experiencing graphology. London: Freund.
Avé-Lallemant, U (1988) Graphologie der Jugendlichen, Vol. 2: Eine Dynamische Graphologie. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt.
Avé-Lallemant, U (1984) The Star-Wave-Test. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt Verlag.
Avé-Lallemant, U (1983) Pubertätskrise und Handschrift. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt.
Avé-Lallemant, U (1982) Notsignale in Schülerschriften. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt
Avé-Lallemant, U (1976) Baum Tests. Olten: Walter Verlag.
Avé-Lallemant, U (1970) Graphologie der Jugendlichen, Vol. 1: Längsschnittanalyse. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt
1. Dietrich Gottstein has stated: " there was indeed some financial, and in addition a case of substancial moral support: - The work in Bavarian schools producing the data material for Graphology of the Youth Vol. 1 was strongly supported by the Bavarian Ministery of Culture that is in charge of the school system here; they got actively involved. - The work was financially supported by the Brinckmann tobacco company in Bremen, which also helped to finish Vol. 2 - The English SWT, done specially for Israel, was financed by the Springer (Berlin) press company (Axel Springer).
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17 Dec 2003. Corrections to bradlen@graphology.ws
