What Your House, Your Tree, and Your Person Say, According to Buck's H-T-P Method (and What the Real Evidence Says)
Three blank sheets of paper.
A house. A tree. A person.
Nothing more.
That’s how one of the most widely used drawing tests in clinical psychology since 1948 begins.
Who created it, and why three drawings
John N. Buck, an American clinical psychologist.
He developed the method starting in 1946. Published it in 1948.
His starting point: Florence Goodenough’s Draw-A-Man Test, already used to measure children’s intelligence.
Buck asked a different question: what if, alongside intelligence, a drawing revealed personality too?
And he went further: what if a single drawing wasn’t enough?
His answer was three objects, each with a different job:
- The house → would evoke domestic and family life.
- The tree → a deeper, less conscious self-portrait.
- The person → a direct self-portrait, closer to how you see yourself.
How it’s actually applied
The real protocol isn’t just “draw.”
After each drawing comes a structured questionnaire.
Typical questions about the house:
- What’s it made of?
- Is it yours?
- Does it feel welcoming?
- What’s the weather like in the drawing?
Typical questions about the tree:
- How old is it?
- Is it alive?
- If not, what happened to it?
Typical questions about the person:
- Is it a boy or a girl?
- What are they doing?
- Are they happy?
For Buck, the questionnaire wasn’t an extra. It was half the test.
The catalogue that made it popular: Jolles
Buck left a general framework.
Isaac Jolles filled it with detail in 1964.
His book: an item-by-item catalogue of what each part of each drawing supposedly meant.
Some real examples from his system:
- Very small door → reticence, inadequacy, indecision.
- Missing door → inaccessibility, isolation.
- Chimney with excessive smoke → extreme tension at home.
- Missing windows → isolation.
- Numerous windows → exhibitionism.
- Omitted roots → insecurity.
- Arms glued to the body → passivity.
- Omitted arms → guilt, feelings of inadequacy.
Every detail, a meaning. That’s Jolles’s style.
Summary table: what this method claimed vs. what the evidence says today
| Drawn element | The method claimed | Evidence today |
|---|---|---|
| Very small house | Castration anxiety (Burns, 1982) | No specific support |
| Missing door | Inaccessibility, isolation | No specific support |
| Chimney with no smoke | Lack of affection at home | No specific support |
| Numerous windows | Exhibitionism | No studies isolating it |
| Omitted roots | Insecurity | Simplest possible technical explanation |
| Thick lines | Tension, anxiety, vigor | No specific support |
| Omitted facial features | Isolation | No specific support |
| Extended arms | Need for achievement | No specific support |
| Highly detailed clothing | Immaturity | No conclusive data |
What the real evidence says
The strongest evidence is recent. And it’s large.
2022. Nearly 4,200 Chinese children and adolescents.
Researchers trained neural networks to analyze thousands of H-T-P drawings automatically.
The networks did learn to tell a house apart from a tree and from a person. That part worked.
What didn’t work: predicting depression from those drawings.
The authors’ own conclusion, in short: none of the H-T-P indicators studied related reliably to mental health.
It isn’t an isolated critique from a single line of research.
Motta, Little, and Tobin (1993), reviewing human figure drawings as an assessment tool as a whole, reached a similar conclusion: they don’t reliably assess personality, behavior, or emotional state.
And on the specific graphic signs (thickness, shading, placement on the page), the problem runs even deeper.
Kahill’s (1984) review of the human figure drawing test, which uses the same kind of signs, found that 28 of 30 cited indices had no consistent support.
Since the person in the H-T-P is drawn with the same logic as a classic human figure drawing, that same critique carries over directly.
Why shading is a special case
Shading deserves its own mention.
Handler and Reyher (1965) pointed out something telling about this specific sign:
- It’s been used to explain the presence of anxiety.
- And it’s also been used to explain efforts to control it.
In other words: shading “proves” anxiety. Not shading also, sometimes, “proves” control over anxiety.
A sign that explains any possible outcome isn’t a scientific sign.
It’s a story that bends to fit whatever’s needed.
How our test works
We measure 13 indicators from this tradition, spread across the three drawings:
- 5 are measured directly from your own drawing: size of the house, size and placement of the person, pencil thickness, deliberate use of shading.
- 8 depend on you telling us what you drew: door, chimney, windows, roots, fruit, facial features, arms, clothing.
Each indicator appears alongside two things: what the method claimed (Buck or Jolles) and what the evidence says today, hiding neither.
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, not fine motor skill.
If you want to see these 13 indicators applied to your own drawings, you can take the House-Tree-Person Test.
The person in the H-T-P is drawn with the same logic as a classic human figure drawing: if you want to go deeper on just that drawing, the Machover method is the original reference.
Sources
- Buck, J. N. (1948). The H-T-P technique, a qualitative and quantitative scoring manual. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 4, 317-396.
- Jolles, I. (1964). A Catalogue for the Qualitative Interpretation of the House-Tree-Person (H-T-P). Western Psychological Services.
- Lin, Y., Zhang, N., Qu, Y., Li, T., Liu, J., & Song, Y. (2022). The House-Tree-Person test is not valid for the prediction of mental health: An empirical study using deep neural networks. Acta Psychologica, 230, 103734.
- Motta, R. W., Little, S. G., & Tobin, M. I. (1993). The use and abuse of human figure drawings. School Psychology Quarterly, 8(3), 162-169.
- Kahill, S. (1984). Human figure drawing in adults: An update of the empirical evidence, 1967-1982. Canadian Psychology, 25, 269-292.
- 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.
- Wikipedia: House-Tree-Person test, for a general introduction to the method.
Want to know more about yourself?
Discover your result with one of our related tests.
Frequently asked questions
Who was John Buck?
An American clinical psychologist who developed the H-T-P (House-Tree-Person) test starting in 1946 and formally published it in 1948, inspired by Florence Goodenough's Draw-A-Man Test.
Why three drawings instead of just one?
Buck believed the house, the tree, and the person would work as three distinct projection screens: the house toward domestic life, the tree toward a deeper, more unconscious self-portrait, and the person toward a more conscious, direct self-portrait.
How many of its indicators have real scientific support?
None of the 13 our test measures currently has consistent, isolated empirical backing. A 2022 study of nearly 4,200 participants, using neural networks, found that H-T-P indicators didn't reliably predict the mental health of the person drawing.
Who was Isaac Jolles?
The author of an H-T-P interpretation catalogue published in 1964, far more detailed than Buck's original manual. Most of the specific symbolic readings that circulate today about this test (door, chimney, windows, roots...) come from his catalogue, not from Buck's original text.
