5
What does the drawing of a house tell us?
• Associations concerning home-life • Intrafamilial relationships • Attitude toward their home situation (children) • Relationships to parents and siblings • Married adults
18
Windows
• Placement of the windows.
19
Chimney Smoke
• Smoke emphasized. • Smoke veering sharply to one side, as if indicating a strong wind.
20
House Perspective
27
Tree
• The adult mind is capable of voluntarily assuming different attitudes in its perception and experience of the environment. • The person can be at one moment the detached observer; the next moment be open receptively to all the impressions from the environment and the feelings and pleasures aroused by them; and in the next project himself or herself in emphatic experience with some object of the environment.
11
Walls
• The outline of the walls of the house drawn with a faint and inadequate line quality • Inadequate wall periphery • Transparent walls
12
Door
• The door is the detail of the house that allows direct contact with the environment. • A door that is tiny in relation to the size of the windows and the house • The door placed high above the house’s baseline and not made more approachable by steps
– Bats in the belfry – Fantasy distorts one’s mental functioning is spoken of in terms of an impairment in the individual’s roof.
8
House
• Overly large roof, overhanging & dwarfing the rest of the house • Schizophrenic patients or schizoid p.d.
2
Administration
• Pencil & white paper. • Patient asked to draw a good house (as good as possible), take as much time as needed, erase anything you need to. • Then the pencil is taken away & you can use crayons in anyway to shade in or draw.
22
Perspective
• The house drawn from the rear, esp. if there is no back door. • The rare rear view depictions.
23
Groundline
• The relationship of the drawn house, tree, person to the groundline reflects the patient’s degree of contact with reality. • Whether the contact with the ground is either firm or tenuous is of major diagnostic interest.
24
Groundline
• difficulty presenting the drawing as a whole • For example, choppy or sporadically-uprooted (in the tree) from the ground and toppling.
• The house drawn as if the viewer is above and looking down upon it (the birds-eye view). • Worm’s eye view - in which the house is presented as if the viewer is below and looking up at it.
6
The Tree & the person
• Paul Schilder (1935): the tree & the person touch the core of the personality = body image and self-concept.
7
House
• Roof: fantasy area of their lives.
28
Tree
• The tree has been the symbol for life and growth. • What if the patient neglects the branches? • Sometimes patients will draw a tree that is tossed by the wind and broken by storms.
• Shutters or curtains added to the window and presented as closed. • Shutters, shades, or curtains put on the windows but presented as open or partially open. • Windows completely bare, without curtains or shades nor crosshatching.
14
Windows
• In the drawing of the house, windows represent a secondary medium of interaction with the environment. • Emphasis upon window locks.
15
Windows
The House-TreePerson Test
Carolyn R. Fallahi, Ph. D.
1
Background
• HTP: Draw a house, tree, person, & opposite sex person. • Inner view of himself/herself • the environment • the things considered important
16
Windows
• Reinforcement of window outlines, if similar reinforcement does not occur elsewhere in the drawing. • Size of the window.
17
Bathroom
• Undue importance given to the bathroom by making the window in that room the largest of all the windows.
25
Accessories
• Some patients directly reveal their feelings of insecurity by having to surround and buttress their house with many bushes, trees, and other details unrelated to the instruction. • A walkway, easily drawn and well proportioned, leading to the door.
13
Door
• The overly large door. • The drawing of the door as open • If the house is said to be vacant, the open door connotes ? • Emphasis upon locks and/or hinges
3
Projectives
• The Theory behind Projective techniques. • Why is the HTP ambiguous?
4