Things in The Body

The correlation between the verbal testimony of the patient and the indications of the drawing test is also rather interesting.

Libins’ test

The so-called ideographic test, which has been already mentioned above, is used in the work as well. This test was developed in Russia by V. V. Libin and A. V. Libin. A patient is given the task to draw a symbolic figure of a person of squares, circles, and triangles. The number of elements in the figure is 10. As a rule, this kind of a drawing is highly informative.

In connection with the objectives of the study, the test data are used in a special way: on the one hand, as a very convenient beginning of the work, on the other, as a verifier of information coming from the patient verbally. In general, the use of the test is aimed at the tasks of psychocatalysis of bodily sensations. Let me remind you once again that this is different from the author’s expert use of the test data.

More than 1000 patients were examined. Many of them were examined in dynamics. It turned out that there is a clear correlation between what the patients report, referring to the sensations in the body, and what they draw.

The zone of the body, concentrating the sensations now, appears in the figure «marked’ as extension (a circle) or an additional element. The «de-energized’ zone is a narrowing (a triangle). The image clearly represents the distribution of internal sensations in the body. This is especially clear if the patient is offered to draw a figure, and then to calibrate the colors used on the scale of pleasantness, just as it is done in Lüscher’s test (my modification. – A. E.). The most «unpleasant’ color shows the most problematic zone, the most «pleasant’ is a zone with positive potential. A series of drawings, respectively, is a series of problem states of the patient in varying degrees of activation. Double expressiveness – geometric and color – especially facilitates the identification of the locus of experiences. (In this edition the color solutions of patients’ drawings are not reproduced).