What Your Family Drawing Says, According to Corman's Method (and What the Real Evidence Says)
Draw a family.
Not yours. One you imagine.
That was the instruction a French physician changed in 1964.
And that change, he believed, opened a door the earlier instruction had kept shut.
The origin: two physicians, two instructions
Maurice Porot created the test in 1952.
His instruction was simple: “Draw your family.”
Louis Corman modified it in 1964.
His instruction: “Draw a family, a family you imagine.”
The difference looks small. It isn’t.
- Asking for the real family limits the drawing to a portrait.
- Asking for an imagined family leaves room for the unconscious.
Corman believed that deliberate vagueness let tendencies the subject doesn’t control slip through.
Our test follows Corman’s instruction exactly, not Porot’s.
How the real test is applied
The materials are minimal:
- A blank sheet of paper.
- A pencil.
- An eraser.
- No rulers, no templates.
After the drawing comes the part many people forget: the interview.
Typical questions:
- Where are they?
- What are they doing there?
- Who’s the happiest? Why?
- Who’s the least happy? Why?
- If you were part of this family, who would you be?
Without this interview, according to the method’s own proponents, the drawing loses half its information.
Corman’s four levels
Corman didn’t look at a drawing in one glance. He broke it down into four layers:
- Graphic level. Force of the stroke, rhythm, which part of the page gets used.
- Structural level. How the figures relate to each other in space.
- Content level. Who gets valued, who gets devalued, who gets left out.
- Psychoanalytic interpretation. The symbolic backdrop behind all of the above.
The heart of his system sits in the third level: valorization and devaluation.
The central concept: valorization
Corman believed this: order and size give away who you value most.
His logic, step by step:
- The figure you think of first is the one you draw first.
- That figure usually ends up larger than the rest, proportionally.
- It tends to be more finished: more detail, more care.
- It sometimes appears next to a powerful figure (a father, a mother).
And the reverse, devaluation:
- The devalued figure is drawn smaller.
- It’s placed last, often at an edge of the page.
- It can end up far from everyone else.
- In the most extreme cases, it disappears from the drawing entirely.
Corman was cautious about that last point. He warned that leaving someone out doesn’t always mean serious rivalry. Sometimes it’s just a passing wish for more attention.
An unexpected twist: animals
Corman noticed something curious.
Some children, instead of people, drew animals.
His interpretation:
- Domestic animal → passive tendencies, a wish to be cared for.
- Wild animal → aggressive tendencies.
Sometimes, Corman said, the animal replaces a sibling whose importance the child wants to shrink.
Summary table: what Corman claimed vs. what the evidence says today
| Sign | Corman claimed | Evidence today |
|---|---|---|
| Large drawing | Expansive or aggressive response to surroundings | No specific support |
| Small drawing | Inferiority, insecurity | No specific support |
| Thick strokes | Powerful passions, boldness | No specific support |
| Thin strokes | Shyness, inhibition | No specific support |
| Shading | Anxiety | No support, unfalsifiable sign |
| Drawn first | Whoever is valued most | No studies isolating it |
| Larger figure | Valorized figure | No specific support |
| Distance between figures | Emotional distance | No conclusive data |
| Domestic animal | Passive tendencies | Untested clinical hypothesis |
| Wild animal | Aggressive tendencies | Untested clinical hypothesis |
What the real evidence says
The most cited review of this family of techniques is Handler and Habenicht (1994).
Their conclusion, in short: empirical support for this type of test’s complex interpretive hypotheses remains weak.
They don’t say everything is useless. They say the specific claims, sign by sign, don’t hold up well against data.
A 2021 study, published in the journal Avaliação Psicológica, measured something more concrete: how many indicators actually discriminate between a clinical group and a normative one.
The result: only 38.46% of items showed a statistically significant difference between the two groups.
In other words: most of the signs, tested against real data, didn’t distinguish between a child with difficulties and one without them.
Shading and erasures have an even deeper problem.
Handler and Reyher (1965) pointed out something telling: these signs have been used to explain both the presence of anxiety and efforts to control it.
That makes the sign almost impossible to refute. Any outcome “confirms” the theory.
A sign that can never fail isn’t a scientific sign. It’s an explanation that bends to fit whatever comes up.
Why it’s still used, despite all this
None of these criticisms are new. They’ve been published for decades.
And yet, the test remains popular in clinical practice with children.
One possible explanation: inter-rater reliability really is reasonably good for specific, quantifiable signs (like a figure’s size).
Reliability isn’t the same as validity.
Two psychologists measuring the same thing precisely doesn’t prove that “same thing” predicts anything real about personality.
How our test works
Our version measures 11 indicators from Corman’s system:
- 4 are measured directly from your own drawing: size, placement, pencil thickness, deliberate use of shading.
- 7 depend on you telling us what you drew: who you drew first, whether there’s a larger figure, whether you separated the parents, whether you included animals, among others.
Next to each one, the report shows what Corman claimed and what the real evidence says, without picking one and hiding the other.
One note, as with the rest of this site: a stroke made with a mouse never reproduces the real pressure of a pencil on paper. It measures magnitudes (size, position, chosen thickness), not fine motor skill.
If you want to see these 11 indicators applied to your own drawing, you can take the Family Drawing Test.
Corman noticed that a child sometimes draws an animal instead of a person within the family: that’s the same substitution studied in depth by the Draw-an-Animal Test by Levy.
Sources
- Corman, L. (1964). Le test du dessin de famille (symbolisation par un animal des tendances interdites). Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal.
- Corman, L. (1964). Le test du dessin de famille en pratique médico-pédagogique. Presses Universitaires de France.
- Porot, M. (1952). Le dessin de la famille. Doctoral thesis, Université de Lyon.
- Handler, L., & Habenicht, D. (1994). The Kinetic Family Drawing Technique: A review of the literature. Journal of Personality Assessment, 62(3), 440-464.
- Handler, L., & Reyher, J. (1965). Figure drawing anxiety indexes: A review of the literature. Journal of Projective Techniques and Personality Assessment, 29(3), 305-313.
- Klumpp, C. F. B., Vilar, M., Pereira, M., & Andrade, M. S. (2021). Estudo de evidências de validade discriminante para o Desenho da Família Cinética. Avaliação Psicológica, 20(2), 241-252.
- Wikipedia: Kinetic Family Drawing, the related technique created by Burns and Kaufman in 1970, for a general introduction to the method.
Want to know more about yourself?
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Frequently asked questions
Who was Louis Corman?
A French psychoanalyst physician who in 1964 published Le test du dessin de famille, a variant of the Family Drawing test Maurice Porot had proposed in 1952. Corman changed the original instruction ('draw your family') to 'draw a family you imagine,' aiming for freer projection.
How many of its indicators have real scientific support?
None of the 11 our test measures currently has consistent, isolated empirical backing. The most cited review of this family of techniques (Handler and Habenicht, 1994) concludes that empirical support for its complex interpretive hypotheses is weak overall.
Is this the same as the Kinetic Family Drawing?
No, though they're related. Corman's version asks for a static drawing ('draw a family'). The Kinetic Family Drawing, created by Burns and Kaufman in 1970, additionally asks that each figure be shown doing something. They share much of the same interpretive logic.
Why would a drawing of a family reveal anything about the person who drew it?
Corman started from a psychoanalytic idea: since there's no single correct way to draw a family, every decision (size, order, who ends up close to whom) would reveal, without the person realizing it, how they experience their own family bonds. It's a reasonable-sounding hypothesis at first glance, but once tested against data, almost none of its specific predictions held up.
