122 • Introduction to Art Therapy
Projective Drawings
The first individual to standardize procedures for using drawing tests with patients was a
German psychiatrist named Fritz Mohr in 1906 (Malchiodi, 1998). Using children’s draw-
ings of a person to measure intellectual development was pioneered by a child psycholo-
gist in 1926 as the Draw-a-Man Test (Goodenough, 1926). In 1931, a psychiatrist named
Kenneth Appel^2 (who commented on one of Naumburg’s early published cases) described
an extensive “drawing battery” he was using in his initial interviews with children, which
included drawing human figures.
Clinical psychologist Karen Machover noticed that many features of person drawings
seemed to be dynamically significant, so she included the task in her assessments. In
1949 she published a book describing a number of “signs” and their presumed meaning
in her Draw-a-Person Test (DAP) (Machover, 1949). Psychologist John Buck also saw
meanings in the drawings on IQ tests, and in 1948 he introduced his House-Tree-Person
Test (H-T-P),^3 in which all three topics were part of the task. His hypothesis was that the
house and tree drawings were also self-projections, but less obvious and therefore poten-
tially more revealing.
Central to projective drawing analysis is the assumption that formal elements—like
placement, line quality, or shading—are as significant as subject matter. Since many early art
therapists were trained by clinical psychologists during the heyday of projective drawings,
they incorporated them into their own work and taught their students (Drachnik, 1995).
Most art therapists no longer rely on the projective drawing tasks still used by some clinical
psychologists, due to a literature that has demonstrated their lack of validity. In learning
from people’s artwork, however, art therapists also consider form as well as content.
An emphasis on form is the basis for art therapist Linda Gantt’s development of the
Formal Elements Art Therapy Scale, a rating manual for drawings of a Person Picking an
Apple From a Tree (PPAT), a topic first used by art educator Viktor Lowenfeld (1957) to stim-
ulate the child’s identification with the activity being represented (DVD 6.4). Indeed, most
art therapy assessments have incorporated psychological testing’s demand for standardized
Figure 6.3 Donald W. Winnicott, Squiggle Game.