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 introduced in 1964, convinced it opened a door the earlier instruction had kept shut.

The origin: two physicians, two instructions

Maurice Porot created the test in 1952 with a simple instruction: “Draw your family.” Louis Corman modified it in 1964: “Draw a family, a family you imagine.”

The difference looks small, but for Corman it was decisive. Asking for the real family limits the drawing to a portrait; asking for an imagined family would, in his view, leave room for tendencies the person drawing doesn’t control. Our test follows Corman’s instruction, not Porot’s.

How the test is applied

The materials are minimal: a blank sheet of paper, a pencil, and an eraser, with no rulers or templates.

After the drawing comes the part people most often forget, the interview. The questions ask where the figures are, what they’re doing, who’s the happiest and who’s the least happy, and why. The final question is usually: “If you were part of this family, who would you be?” According to the method’s own proponents, without this conversation the drawing loses much of its information.

Corman’s four levels

Corman broke the drawing down into four layers:

1. Graphic level: force of the stroke, rhythm, and which part of the page gets used.
2. Structural level: how the figures relate to each other in space.
3. Content level: who gets valued, who gets devalued, who gets left out.
4. 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

For Corman, order and size give away who is valued most. The figure that comes to mind first is drawn first, usually ends up larger than the rest, proportionally, and more finished, with more detail. It sometimes appears next to a powerful figure, such as the father or the mother.

Devaluation would be the reverse: the figure is drawn smaller, last, often at an edge of the page or far from everyone else, and in the most extreme cases it disappears from the drawing.

Corman was cautious about that last point. He warned that leaving someone out doesn’t always mean serious rivalry and that sometimes it expresses only a passing wish for more attention.

Animals in the family

Corman noticed that some children drew animals instead of people, and devoted an article to it in 1964. His reading was that a domestic animal would express passive tendencies or a wish to be cared for, and a wild animal, aggressive tendencies. Sometimes, he 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 evidence says

The most cited review of this family of techniques is Handler and Habenicht (1994), focused on the Kinetic Family Drawing, the related variant by Burns and Kaufman. Their conclusion, in short, is that empirical support for this type of test’s complex interpretive hypotheses remains weak. They don’t claim the technique is useless in a clinical interview, but that the specific claims, sign by sign, don’t hold up well against data.

Shading and erasures also have a deeper problem. Handler and Reyher (1965) pointed out that these signs have been used to explain both the presence of anxiety and the efforts to control it. With that double reading, any drawing confirms the hypothesis, and a prediction that can’t fail can’t be put to the test.

Why it’s still used

None of these criticisms are new, and yet the test remains popular in clinical practice with children. Part of the explanation is that specific, quantifiable signs, like a figure’s size, can be scored with fairly good agreement between raters.

But reliability isn’t the same as validity. Two psychologists measuring the same thing precisely doesn’t prove that what they measure says anything true about the personality or family bonds of the person drawing. Another part of the explanation is its value as a pretext for talking with a child, which doesn’t depend on the signs meaning what Corman believed.

How our test works

Our Family Drawing Test collects 11 indicators from Corman’s system:

• 4 are measured directly from your stroke: size, placement, pencil thickness, and 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, or whether you included animals, among others.

Next to each one, the report shows what Corman claimed and what the evidence says, hiding neither. A stroke made with a mouse doesn’t reproduce the pressure of a pencil on paper: it records magnitudes like size, position, or chosen thickness.

Replacing a person with an animal, which Corman observed within the family drawing, is the starting point of another technique, 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, 9(5), 417-430. https://doi.org/10.1177/070674376400900508
• Corman, L. (1964). Le test du dessin de famille dans la pratique médico-pédagogique. Presses Universitaires de France.
• Porot, M. (1952). Le dessin de la famille. Exploration par le dessin de la situation affective de l’enfant dans sa famille. Pédiatrie.
• Handler, L., & Habenicht, D. (1994). The Kinetic Family Drawing Technique: A review of the literature. Journal of Personality Assessment, 62(3), 440-464. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa6203_5
• 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.