drawings were collected and analysed as evidence for specific kinds of mental activity in 
 the context of early child psychology , beginning in the 1870s .
researchers distinguished 
 children s image production from subjective artistic expression , establishing drawing as a 
 material trace of universal patterns of cognitive development .
of course , scribbles , doodles 
 and sketches populate the margins of countless documents belonging to everyone from 
 eighteenth - century schoolboys to us presidents ; in examining scientific uses of drawing , it 
 becomes particularly important to underscore how the simple act of putting pen to paper is 
 historically circumscribed . 
 
both in science and in art , changing norms of observation and representation have 
 influenced the way that people draw .
in early nineteenth - century europe and america , 
 representational drawing ability belonged to the set of socially valued skills cultivated in 
 elite schools . 
  by the 1820s , a market for drawing instruction developed among the upwardly mobile 
 middle classes , reflected in an explosion of popular how - to books such as samuel prout s 
 easy lessons in landscape drawing ( figure  4 ) .
drawing instruction was soon incorporated into the curricula of state - sponsored 
 educational institutions , both for its salubrious influence on character and for its 
 potential industrial applications . 
 

source : r. ackermann , easy lessons in landscape 
 drawing ( london : r. ackerman , 1820 ) . 
 
source : r. ackermann , easy lessons in landscape 
 drawing ( london : r. ackerman , 1820 ) . as a component of primary education
regardless of the strategies that instructors adopted , their efforts established 
 representational drawing as an increasingly standardised visual language . in this vein , 

david maclagan points out that drawings  are linked in different ways to conventional 
 communicative modes , reflecting the  established pictorial codes of a particular time and 
 place . 
 
however , maclagan also notes that the unconscious reproduction of these codes was 
 understood , starting in the late nineteenth century , as  a subliminal kind of pictorial 
 lingua franca revealing the underlying essence of the human mind . 
 
indeed , it was precisely in this context  a society where most primary school 
 students learned to evaluate the 
correctness of outline , proportion and shading  that 
 drawings could become a taken - for - granted indicator of cognitive development and mental 
 soundness .
pioneers in the emerging field of child study turned the pedagogical goals of 
 drawing instructors inside out by asking how the rules of visual language were acquired and 
 what mental architectures they revealed . 
 
they documented and classified the process of learning to draw as a proxy for 
 learning to think , based on the proposition that images provided unique access to the 
 developing mind . 
 
g. stanley hall was , in large part , responsible for bringing quantitative , developmentally 
 oriented child study to the united states from germany , where the growth of state - sponsored 
 education had produced a vigorous field of pedagogical research by the 1870s . in 1880 , hall 
 asked hundreds of boston school children to produce drawings of everyday objects as part of 
 his  inventory of the child mind. the  inventory was , quite literally , a laundry - list of 
 things that children knew : animals , places and household objects .
the list was generated 
 through one - on - one interviews conducted by elementary school teachers using standardised 
 response forms .
most of the prompts were verbal , but hall expressed reservations about this 
 methodology , acknowledging that children s vocabulary did not necessarily correspond with 
 their functional understanding . 
 
he thus included drawing tasks in the inventory , claiming that  [ d]rawings reveal 
 the child s psychic life in an extraordinary way and show its motor development [ and ] the 
 directions of its interests ... . 
  hall s main interest lay in amassing observations on a scale large enough to reveal 
 generic patterns of the  child mind. although hall soon moved on from child study to other endeavours in the emerging 
 constellation of the social sciences , his followers attempted to systematise his methods and 
 build theories from the data they gathered .
pedagogical seminary , the 
 journal that hall founded in 1891 , regularly published analyses of children s drawings , 
 written by a growing class of psychologists and educators who had begun to specialise in 
 this area . among the more prolific was herman t. lukens , who served as an honorary fellow 
 under hall at clark university from 1894 to 1895 , and returned as a docent in pedagogy from 
 1899 to 1900 . 
 
lukens collected 3400 drawings from children between two and sixteen years of age , 
 publishing his findings in 1896 .
such vast accumulations had become a trend in child study ; 
 some projects netted many thousands of drawings , and requested still more samples from the 
 journal s readers , with the promise that treasured artworks would be duplicated and 
 returned . 
 
unlike other traces of the child mind that had to be abstracted from 
 observed behaviour into tables and charts , drawings were printed directly in professional 
 journals utilising a visual rhetoric of immediacy .
lukens presented series of drawings done 
 by the same children over the course of many years to illustrate their linear development ; 
 the gradual  complete clarification of the mental image into a picture on the page . 
 
 figure  5:drawing by lillian l. at four years , three months old .
source : lukens ,  a study of 
 children s drawings in the early years , pedagogical seminary 4 , 1 
 ( 1896 ) 102 . 
 
source : lukens ,  a study of 
 children s drawings in the early years , pedagogical seminary 4 , 1 
 ( 1896 ) 102 .
because the children in lukens s study were so young , he saw their drawings as an 
 unmediated glimpse into their mental architecture ,  a subjective rather than an objective 
 picture of the world as perceived and understood . 
 
a certain level of expertise , however , was required to interpret these often jumbled 
 glimpses . 
the tangle of lines over the legs is not in any case to be interpreted as 
 shading , he asserted of the child s drawing in figure  5 . 
 
such an interpretation would violate the accepted developmental chronology , 
 attributing faculties to the child that experts believed that he or she could not possess . 

his text framed the drawings with a narrative that included statements of his subjects about 
 their drawing processes and their intentions :  the child drew one perpendicular line which 
 she called a leg , then a parallel line which she called the other leg. 
  he also provided reassurances about his control over the experimental setting . 

although the collection of drawings did not take place in a psychological laboratory , and 
 parents or teachers were often present , lukens inserted narrative asides such as , 
her 
 mother meanwhile looked on in silence , giving no suggestions , asserting the impartiality of 
 the arrangement . 
 
when an adult intervened , lukens was careful to justify the action and minimise its 
 influence on the results .
barbara wittmann has emphasised the drastic stripping away of 
 context in early italian and german studies of child art ; later researchers , such as lukens , 
 recognised the need for some context , but maintained tight control over what information 
 framed the material evidence . 
 
although lukens spoke of children s drawings as direct projections from their minds , motor 
 development had an undeniable impact on the images .
lukens incorporated the relative manual 
 dexterity of children at different ages into his assessment .
this opened up the possibility 
 that very young children were , in fact , visualising objects 
the drawings of lillian l. at the age of two  show the utter 
 lack of any apparent connection between a mental picture in consciousness and the movements 
 made by the hand and fingers in attempting to draw it. 
  once lillian l.s drawing ability had improved to the point where she could capture 
 contours , however , lukens readily asserted a correspondence between the acuity of her mental 
 imagery and the accuracy of her drawing :  it probably corresponds to a clarification of the 
 mental image in the child s mind by a gradually greater discrimination on her part between 
 the motor elements and the strictly visual elements ... . 
  this  clarification of the image by eliminating noise produced drawings of true 
 scientific value .
thus , although young children were considered ideal subjects for research 
 into the primitive mind , in practice , they were not so useful during their most primitive 
 stages .
the theories of child study experts presupposed a true hand that could accurately 
 relay the mind s messages .
they focused on subjects within a particular developmental window 
 who made optimal self - registering instruments . 
  like hall , lukens used children s drawings to argue for a recapitulation theory of human 
 mental development : both saw  striking analogies in the pictorial evolution of man between 
 the child and the race. 
  influenced by widespread scientific enthusiasm for ernst haeckel s biogenetic law , 
 they equated child art with the 
simplistic images produced by primitive cultures , which 
 progressed to the mastery of realism and linear perspective indicative of modern 
 civilisation .
lukens , however , sought to nuance this  conventional and generic 
 classification of children s drawings . in his work , we see a turn away from hall s 
 statistical abstractions and towards narrative interpretation .
although he would not go as 
 far as freud or later promoters of art therapy , lukens swerved into a grey area between the 
 survey style , which considered children s affective states only in so far as they interfered 
 with the registration of accurate responses , and the analytic style which saw drawings as 
 manifestations of a non - verbalised subjectivity . 
the little child draws from his own 
 consciousness and thus puts his own consciousness into the picture , lukens claimed , meaning 
 that the drawing could not be a pure scientific object in the way that some 
 recapitulationists had supposed . 
 
although he considered child art analogous to  the pictographic stage in the race 
 development [ that ] has preceded and led up to the alphabetic stage , it also usefully 
 encoded the particulars of a child s experiences , likes and dislikes . 
 
it was , paradoxically , a more objective modality than speech for getting at the 
 unique thinking of each child , since  words are often repeated meaninglessly , while 
 drawings are pure  form synonyms for thoughts. 
  again , lukens asserted that the mind  hand relay of the ideal drawing child was free 
 from interference by contextual factors beyond those that he identified as relevant to the 
 investigation of children s interiority .
while child study gave way to laboratory - centred developmental psychology in the early 
 twentieth century , the use of drawings to assess children s cognitive ability was formalised 
 in much the way that hall had envisioned . within the first decade after 1900 , drawing tasks 
 as a measure of development
had become standard , with systems proposed by frederic l. burke , 
 james mark baldwin , james sully , william stern and many others . 
  in 1926 ,
draw - a - man test , 
 establishing a widely adopted rubric for correlating children s drawings with their 
 intelligence as measured by the stanford - binet intelligence scale . 
 
also in the 1920s , jean piaget developed his influential four - stage theory of 
 artistic development in children , which posited a progression from 
visual realism. 
  recapitulation fell away as an explicit foundation for these rubrics , although 
 informal comparisons between children ,  primitive races and even primates and animals 
 persisted . 
 
instead , the post - world war i professionalisation of american psychology led to a 
 narrowing of scope from the domain of cognitive process to that of  cognitive performance 
 and ability. 
  psychometric tests with industrial and military applications proliferated , often 
 employing drawing tasks that extended child study techniques for circumscribing subjectivity 
 to adult test takers . 
 
the manual nature of these tests , the inscriptions they produced and the systems of 
 evaluation that psychologists developed helped to naturalise a set of cultural assumptions 
 about correct ways of drawing , making them a proxy for healthy ways of thinking .
of course , the possibility of individualised meaning and interpretation was not excluded 
 from all areas of psychology that employed drawing as a technique .
many practitioners 
 understood patient art as a pathway to the otherwise inaccessible interior of troubled 
 psyches . 
 
patient art figured prominently in the case studies of freud , jung and followers of 
 psychodynamic psychology .
this analytical approach to drawing filtered into american popular 
 culture as the  cult of the doodle that arose in the 1920s and 1930s , wherein armchair 
 analysts collected the doodles of the rich and famous and subjected them to 
 psychobiographical interpretation . 
  whether freudian or popular , this interpretive school linked drawings to individual 
 subjects and specific sociocultural settings .
practitioners still , however , assumed that the 
 relay between mind and hand bypassed the subject s conscious mediation  a mechanism that 
 allowed subliminal desires to be manifested in the idle margin scrawls of patients , 
 presidents and movie stars .
this was the same assumption that allowed drawing to serve child 
 study so well .
it became embedded in the technique , even when that technique served 
 differing ends .
this gives us one history of the emergence of drawing as a material research practice 
 around the turn of the twentieth century .
child study understood drawing as revealing the 
 workings of the mind on a stratum both evolutionarily and developmentally prior to that of 
 language .
primitiveness helped it stand as objective evidence within a 
 recapitulationist framework , obscuring the larger cultural context of art education and the 
 specific context of individual subjects .
hall s concept of the child mind was a taxonomic 
 one , and thus drawings were taken as quasi - archaeological artefacts that captured normalised 
 developmental stages . 
 
such a concept lent itself to application on a mass scale , as the evaluation of 
 images was based on formal criteria  correspondence with the conventions of 
 representational drawing  rather than on subjective content .
the position of psychology in 
 the early twentieth century was such that practical applications in psychometry and 
 intelligence testing were highly valued as routes to professional legitimacy and 
 funding . 
 
on the other hand , lukens and those who leaned towards interpretation believed that 
  children s drawings give us one of the surest ways with which to reach the contents of 
 their minds ; the meaning of images lay in the subjectivity of their makers . 
 
this inclination to interpret rather than evaluate , and to read drawings as 
 expressions of complex subjectivity , saw its realisation in freud s wolf man drawings , the 
 art therapy of margaret naumburg and melanie klein s child psychoanalysis in which drawing 
 served as a  paper tool. 
  although psychoanalysis approached the mind from a very different perspective to 
 psychometry , both envisioned the drawing child as a circuit through which the mind s 
 contents flowed relatively unencumbered , an assumption facilitated by the earlier work of 
 child study . by the early decades of the twentieth century ,
a variety of practitioners embraced the 
 notion that drawings reveal hidden information about the mind , but disagreed as to whether 
 that information pertained to the mind s contents or its function .
the second and third 
 cases presented here follow the functional strain of this divergence , showing how the 
 exclusion of subjective content became especially important for researchers making new and 
 controversial knowledge claims in psychology . at the same time as child study took up drawings as psychological data
, they became central 
 to another fledgling field devoted to the investigation of the human mind .
this field , 
 psychical research , developed a different experimental methodology around the same 
 techniques of pencil and paper .
like the practitioners of child study , psychical researchers 
 reproduced drawings as material proof of an elusive type of mental activity , in this case , 
 telepathic communication .
just as drawings could reveal a developmental resonance between the mind of an individual 
 and the collective mind of a race , they could also demonstrate psychic resonance between two 
 minds .
psychical researchers who studied telepathic phenomena employed drawings as evidence , 
 portraying them as  thought - pictures that manifested , in objective material form , the 
 otherwise - concealed mental processes of mediums . even critics aiming to debunk telepathy 
 used drawing to prove alternate explanations of the phenomenon ; they argued for the 
 prevalence of certain images in an unconscious  community of thought , the contours of which 
 they empirically determined by collecting drawings from the population . 
 
child study emerged concurrently with the first major surge of interest in psychical 
 research , and thus , my comparison is not meant to suggest a chronological relationship in 
 which drawing tests were passed from one to the other . both fields sought to establish 
 drawing as a straightforward instrument that accessed and recorded the contents of the mind . 

both understood drawings as material evidence of thought processes . and both attempted to 
 exclude the individualised , subjective meaning of images from their analyses by placing 
 particular kinds of subjects into controlled experimental settings .
i position child study first in this essay because of its direct connection to the 
 mid - nineteenth - century theories of pedagogy that established drawing as a universal human 
 faculty with objective standards .
mandatory art instruction established drawing as a 
  conventional communicative mode shared by scientists , subjects and the public at 
 large . 
 
a professionalisation story would proceed from psychical research on the margins of 
 science to more respectable child study , and thence to scientific neuropsychiatry .
i have 
 attempted to tell a story not about professionalisation , per se , but about 
 changing attitudes towards subjects and subjectivity . starting with
child study sets the 
 stage for a process of circumscription that did not proceed linearly or uniformly across the 
 discipline .
further , this process generated popular offshoots that held intense interest for 
 the public and continually smuggled subjectivity back into the psychological interpretation 
 of drawings .
interest in mind reading and thought transference surged in anglo - american culture of the 
 1870s , in an environment suffused with spiritualist sances , mesmeric stage performances and 
 other supernormal manifestations . 
 
the public was caught up in the  fascination of the unusual to the great concern of 
 sceptical scientists , who were often called upon to expose the tricks of psychic 
 charlatans . 
 
historians assign this occult revival a dual meaning : it reflected an 
 anti - materialist backlash against secular science , which threatened cherished beliefs about 
 the immortality of the soul . at the same time
, it proclaimed the progress of science in 
 conquering the realm of the invisible . 
 
the many proposed naturalistic explanations for telepathy worked by analogy to the 
 transmission of light , magnetism and electricity .
if those intangibles could be measured and 
 quantified with the new instruments of physics , it seemed plausible that human thought , too , 
 might have its own yet - to - be - discovered wavelength and might travel from mind to mind like a 
 telegraph message . 
  in an age
when communication technology had broken down the barriers of time and 
 distance , and scientists were working towards the wireless telegraph and radio , such 
 expectations were hardly far fetched .
indeed , the psychical researcher and outspoken 
 spiritualist oliver lodge performed what many claim was the first public demonstration of 
 wireless telegraphy at a meeting of the british association for the advancement of science 
 in 1894 , proving that ideas , in the form of electrical impulses , could leap through 
 space . 
 
psychical researchers hoped to determine whether  impressions from the minds of those about 
 us [ can reach ] our own minds by channels distinct from those of the senses. 
  this was the widely adopted working definition of the phenomenon alternately named 
 thought transference or telepathy . 
 
although they saw their project as empirical , researchers faced the challenge of 
 studying people who claimed that their powers of mediumship or clairvoyance appeared only 
 under very particular conditions .
peter lamont has pointed out that psychic practitioners 
 and sceptical inquirers almost never agreed on the evidential criteria for psychic 
 phenomena ; their disagreements , however , were quite nuanced , as both claimed to be working 
 in an empirical , evidence - driven paradigm .
the production of evidence in settings that 
 blended the scientific , social and performative made for minute wrangling over the limits of 
 observation and self - report . 
 
both public mediums , who received payment for stage shows , and private 
 mediums , who demonstrated in parlours and sitting rooms for small circles of invited guests , 
 combined popular spiritualism in the form of channelling and automatic writing with parlour 
 games such as guessing cards or locating hidden objects .
impartial scientific observers , but they shared a social context that made 
 certain behaviours unacceptable . 
 
for instance , spiritualist publications criticised harvard psychologist hugo 
 mnsterberg for an incident in which he took credit for grabbing the foot of the medium 
 eusapia palladino to catch her cheating . 
 
palladino s supporters argued that such breeches of conduct endangered the medium , 
 who was already in a fragile mental state from her exertions . 
 
psychical researchers regularly exposed performers tricks , but they did so within a 
 set of practices that positioned the medium as a particular kind of subject at the mercy of 
 forces , whether spiritual or physiological , that he or she did not control . 
 
researchers attempted to use drawing , a technology of direct inscription , to bypass 
 the epistemological tensions that marked their relationships with their subjects . 
 
such investigations first took an institutional form in 1882 with the founding of the 
 british society for psychical research ( spr ) by physicist , inventor and professed 
 spiritualist william fletcher barrett .
the spr placed mediums and sensitives under 
 experimental conditions aiming to disentangle fraud from genuine phenomena .
one of their 
 foundational experiments involved the brighton duo of george albert smith and douglas 
 blackburn , whose successful transmission of images became a pillar of the spr s argument in 
 favour of telepathy .
the spr needed a more rigorous method to 
 pre - empt deception , and they settled on drawing . in august 1882 ,
blackburn , a local newspaper editor , wrote to the spiritualist periodical 
 light , claiming that george albert smith could read his thoughts  with an 
 accuracy that approaches the miraculous. 
  smith , only eighteen years old at the time , had recently begun performing as a 
 medium in brighton .
he and blackburn colluded to promote his act , with blackburn serving as 
 a confederate onstage at the same time as he published glowing reviews in his paper . 
 
blackburn would 
 later claim that , as a service to science and to the public , he and smith decided to reveal 
  how easy a matter it was to  take in  scientific observers and  credulous 
 spiritualists. 
  the spr s committee on thought - transference , led by barrett , edmund gurney and frederic 
 myers , responded to blackburn s letter with interest .
myers and gurney were cambridge 
 educated and independently wealthy ; they turned their philosophical and scientific training 
 to establishing psychical research as an area of inquiry . during the autumn of 1882 ,
the 
 three committee members conducted a series of tests to verify smith s powers .
they began 
 with the bread - and - butter demonstrations of thought reading : guessing of numbers , names and 
 colours chosen by the experimenters , shown to blackburn and transmitted from blackburn to 
 smith .
these transmissions occurred , the spr promised , with  no sound or movement of the 
 lips of any one ; smith and blackburn were , however , allowed to hold hands . 
 
when the two men were placed in separate rooms their run of successes came to an 
 abrupt halt , and blackburn complained of neuralgia caused by the strain of 
 concentration . 
 
gurney and his colleagues allowed them to resume contact , and they produced more 
 successful thought transferences . although the spr investigators appreciated that hand - holding could be a means of sending a 
 coded message , their subjects asserted that it was also the channel through which their 
 extra - sensory thought transference worked . in the interest of fairness
, the investigators 
 decided to alter the content transmitted , rather than altering the experimental set - up , to 
 exclude the possibility of coded communication .
gurney framed this methodological 
 development with the question ,  how far do impressions of drawings or geometrical figures , 
 inexpressible in descriptive words , admit of being transferred? 
  the activity of drawing would become an instrument for fraud - proof thought 
 transference in the eyes of the spr . on the second day of experiments ,
gurney , myers and barrett  drew some image at random , the 
 figure being of such a character that its shape could not easily be conveyed in words ... in 
 order to meet the assumption that some code  such as the morse alphabet  was used by s. 
 and b. 
  they showed this image to blackburn , blackburn grasped smith s hands and smith sat 
 down and reproduced the image on paper , sometimes while wearing a blindfold .
smith s 
 drawings ,  about as like the original as a child s blindfold drawing of a pig is like a 
 pig , were nonetheless 
recognisable as intended to represent the original figure. 
  this comparison with the rough , unpolished appearance of child art supported the 
 spr s assertion of naivet on the part of the medium . as with child study , an objective 
 concept was discernible through the garbled communication medium of the  scrawl. as with 
 child study , close attention to the signal s distortion
figure  6:(a ) the committee s drawing ; and ( b ) smith s reproduction .
( third 
 report of the committee on thought - transference. proceedings of the society 
 for psychical research , 1 ( 1883 ) , 213 . 
 
( a ) the committee s drawing ; and ( b ) smith s reproduction .
( third 
 report of the committee on thought - transference. proceedings of the society 
 for psychical research , 1 ( 1883 ) , 213 .
the spr took smith s drawings as authoritative evidence of direct communication between 
 minds , asserting that  the burden of explaining these results rests upon those who deny the 
 possibility of thought - transference. 
  they made a point of reproducing the drawings in their journal , the 
 proceedings of the society for psychical research , with the assurance 
 that  the whole series of figures ( nine in number ) are given in the accompanying plates , 
 which are engraved from photographic reproductions , on the wood blocks , of 
 the original drawings ( emphasis original ) . 
 
the technology of photographic wood - block engraving guaranteed that no foul play had 
 intervened ; the direct , unmediated proof was plainly visible , and circulated in the 
 persuasive form of a scientific journal . 
 
wood - block engraving , the illustration technique that generated the vast quantity of images 
 demanded by nineteenth - century mass print , had transformed in the second half of the century 
 from an interpretive art to a facsimile process .
an engraver in the 1840s would have drawn 
 or traced a copy of smith s figures onto the block , potentially smoothing over the rough , 
 unsteady lines to distil a more 
correct representational image . by 1882 , smith s figures 
 could be photographed , the film printed directly onto a wood block and this photographic 
 block carved by a technician trained in mechanical exactitude .
engraving became  harnessed 
 to photographic technologies whose rhetoric of verisimilitude made it possible for 
 thousands of people all over the world to examine the same piece of evidence . 
 
photo - engraving enabled the reproduction of specific images from individual research 
 subjects like smith : it preserved the errors and idiosyncrasies that constituted the actual 
 proof of smith s telepathic power .
as engravings went from idealised representations to 
 exact , unmediated copies , readers could use figures in scientific journals such as the spr s 
 proceedings and hall s pedagogical seminary in a new 
 way .
gurney , myers and barrett described the act of telepathic drawing with terms like 
  deliberate and  continuous that suggested the automatic nature of the medium s activity ; 
 smith worked  as if copying a drawing that is seen. 
  the resulting artefacts could be used to reconstruct the process that produced them . 

this method was attractive because the standardised objects  cards , colours , numbers  that 
 more statistically inclined psychical investigators hoped to employ for scientific data 
 collection offered little insight into the cause or nature of thought transference .
were 
 thoughts transmitted in the form of words , images or as pure concepts ( what william barrett 
 termed 
smith s success in reproducing drawings inspired the spr to move forward with these 
 interesting questions of how and why , using visual specimens to make their arguments to 
 colleagues and readers . 

figure  7:(a )  the original drawing shown to blackburn ; ( b )  smith s first attempt at reproducing 
 the drawing ; and ( c )  smith s second attempt at reproducing the drawing , after 
 blackburn looked at the original again ( source : the  third report of the committee on 
 thought - transference. proceedings of the society for psychical 
 research , 1 ( 1883 ) , 207 ) . 
 
( a )  the original drawing shown to blackburn ; ( b )  smith s first attempt at reproducing 
 the drawing ; and ( c )  smith s second attempt at reproducing the drawing , after 
 blackburn looked at the original again ( source : the  third report of the committee on 
 thought - transference. proceedings of the society for psychical 
 research , 1 ( 1883 ) , 207 ) .
how of thought transference , the spr would have to disentangle perception 
 from cognition and determine whether thought travelled as image or idea .
after an apparently 
 unsuccessful thirteenth trial , the spr investigators asked blackburn , the agent , to 
 reproduce the original image that he had just seen and communicated telepathically to smith 
 ( figure  7(a ) .
blackburn s reproduction revealed that 
 he had misremembered the original image , and communicated that incorrect image to smith 
 ( figure  7(b ) .
for the previous two decades , 
 physiologists had debated whether visual perception was more dependent on processes within 
 the eye or on 
psychical researchers saw an opportunity to weigh in on this question by accessing 
 the mind as it pivoted between perception and cogitation . 
the main errors of mr smith s 
 drawings existed already in mr blackburn s recollection of the drawing , they reported , 
 demonstrating that smith received the inaccurate image from blackburn s flawed memory rather 
 than as a purely visual sense impression . 
  when the investigators showed blackburn the image again , and allowed smith to redraw 
 it ( after grasping blackburn s hand ) , they attributed the improvement in smith s accuracy to 
 blackburn s improved memory ( figure  7(c ) . 
 
these very specific uses of drawing accessed the workings of two minds  that of the agent , 
 blackburn , and the percipient , smith  as they supposedly communicated a visual image . the 
 spr s gurney , myers and barrett weighed the possibility of fraud and ruled it prohibitively 
 difficult due to the  inexpressible nature of the images .
let our readers , who may be familiar with the morse or 
 other code of signals , try in some such way to convey a description of one of our drawings , 
 to a friend who is blindfolded and has not seen the original. 
  drawing was such a useful instrument for the spr because it seemed to capture the 
 irreducible nature of thought in a material form that could be scrutinised for evidence of 
 mental processes .
descriptions of the smith and blackburn experiments arrived in the united states in the 
 winter of 18823 .
american subscribers to the spr s proceedings , including 
 william james , g. stanley hall , george s. fullerton of the university of pennsylvania and 
 henry p. bowditch of harvard medical school , would have seen the report , and it received 
 favourable notice in the scientific press as an 
 eliminate[d ] every possible element of charlatanism. 
  by the following year , with william james leading the charge for an autonomous 
 american version of the spr , the prospective leaders of this group began critically 
 re - evaluating the british society s findings . 
 
although the american society represented itself as a sceptical counterweight to the 
 spiritualist leanings of the british , their reviews of the smith and blackburn report 
 embraced the use of drawing as an experimental methodology . in the published text of his 
 first presidential address to the american society for psychical research ( aspr ) , circulated 
 in the proceedings of july , 1886 , simon newcomb focused his critique on the 
 spr s inconsistent procedures . 
  in the experiments with smith and blackburn , smith was sometimes blindfolded , 
 sometimes not ; sometimes smith and blackburn spoke to each other ,
conditions changed constantly as the experimenters thought of new scenarios they 
 wanted to test .
whereas gurney , myers and barret asserted that  our experiments derive much 
 strength and coherence from their very multitude and variety , newcomb regarded these 
 conditions as unacceptably haphazard : without rigid controls ,  we have no right to attribute 
 the result to one cause [ ie .
, telepathy ] rather than another. 
  this tension between the rigid planning and record keeping of the laboratory and the 
 curiosity - driven exploration of the gentleman or amateur investigator would characterise the 
 aspr s relationships with many of its own constituents , as well as with its british 
 counterpart .
the actual drawings that smith produced represented the most stable , scientifically valid 
 element of the entire undertaking in newcomb s assessment . even in less - than - ideal 
 conditions ,  these copies of drawings have a great advantage over verbal descriptions , 
 newcomb noted ,  in that the record can be made the subject of future study. 
  the permanent , reproducible nature of images was an antidote to the anecdotal style 
 that newcomb and his colleagues found most galling in the spr s work .
interestingly , 
 newcomb s published endorsement of the smith drawings represented a change of course from 
 the more suspicious note that he sounded in his actual presidential speech , on 12 january 
 1886 . in the speech itself , he deemed smith s drawings fraudulent . 
 
what changed his mind was a new set of sketches that he exchanged with william james 
 in the months after his speech , through which james demonstrated the possibility of 
 non - supernatural blindfolded draughtsmanship . 
your drawings seem to show that ... the 
 [ smith ] drawings in question were at least possible , newcomb wrote to james on 16 
 february . 
 
their correspondence reveals the extent to which the practice and material product 
 of drawing served as a persuasive tool for leaders of the aspr .
while newcomb doubted the 
 circumstances of the british society s procedure , a trustworthy colleague such as william 
 james could produce corroborating evidence from his own hand .
thanks to an efficient postal 
 service and the portable nature of drawings , newcomb could then inspect the evidence first 
 hand .
their disagreement was resolved through the mail over the course of a mere ten days , 
 and newcomb edited the text of his speech to reflect his confidence in drawings as evidence .
the aspr further endorsed drawing as a methodology in 1885 , urging its members to attempt 
  the experiments which have attracted so much attention from the english society. 
  this represented an exciting expansion of their research program beyond the 
 repetitive experiments requested in the society s previous circulars , such as the guessing 
 of numbers , colours and cards .
the society acknowledged the heightened appeal of 
 personalised and infinitely variable drawing tasks :  as the experiment of free - drawing may 
 prove more interesting to some persons , it is hoped that more elaborate figures may be 
 tried , and the results forwarded. 
 
 figure  8:illustration from  thought - transference by means of pictures. source : 
 proceedings of the american society for psychical research , 1 
 ( 1885 ) , 44 . 
 
illustration from  thought - transference by means of pictures. source : 
 proceedings of the american society for psychical research , 1 
 ( 1885 ) , 44 .
william henry pickering , a harvard astronomer and founding member of the aspr , published 
 the results of such an experiment as a model accompanying this call for participation . 

pickering s drawings were made  on one or two evenings as an amusement among friends , with 
 a female acquaintance acting as  the sensitive , so called. 
  like most psychical experiments , these were a parlour activity , but one with greater 
 entertainment value and greater power as evidence than the mundane and easily fudged 
 guessing tasks . 
 
the graphic summary of pickering s experiment is particularly striking : all 
 fifty - two pairs of drawings were reduced to thumbnail size and condensed into one page .
this 
 public presentation of a complete run of experiments asserted the scientific transparency of 
 the aspr in contradistinction to the spr , which mainly printed examples of its successful 
 results .
the miniature images conserved valuable pages , but also conveyed the impression of 
 a complete formal taxonomy rather than an informal parlour game . an aggregate view 
 de - emphasised the idiosyncrasies of subject and circumstance that the spr used to justify 
 the failures and fine tuning of their procedures .
such serial presentation had become an 
 important tool of visual rhetoric for nineteenth - century sciences ranging from physics to 
 embryology , including pickering s discipline of astronomy , where debate over the  nebular 
 hypothesis in the 1830s had centred around the arrangement of successively brighter nebulae 
 into an order that suggested temporal progression from diffuse clouds of matter to 
 stars . 
 
pickering s grid of images , lacking any apparent order or progression , subtly 
 asserted the absence of theory - driven manipulation and modelled the randomness necessary to 
 ensure impartial psychical experimentation .
drawings and diagrams featured regularly in the first year of the aspr s 
 proceedings , but , for sceptics within the organisation , this visual 
 evidence soon lost the lustre of the early smith and blackburn successes  or rather , it was 
 appropriated by a different camp within psychical research as proof against , rather than 
 for , the reality of thought transference .
gurney , myers and barrett of the spr interpreted 
 resemblances among drawings as evidence of communication  demonstrating direct transmission 
 of content between minds . 
 
when simon newcomb embraced drawings as evidence , he cited the possibility for 
 reinterpretation as their main advantage : they could be  made the subject 
 of future study. 
  as the aspr set about gathering drawings from its own far - flung correspondents , some 
 began to view the mass of responses as indicating unconscious habits or statistical 
 probability rather than telepathy . 
 
such complex explanations were ultimately not necessary to account for the smith and 
 blackburn phenomenon that had established telepathic drawing as a preferred methodology in 
 psychical research . in a confession published in the popular magazine john 
 bull more than twenty years after his experiments with smith ,
blackburn explained 
 that he had used a numbered ten - by - ten grid to reproduce the 
transferred images , while 
 smith indicated coordinates on the grid through hand squeezes , breathing or tapping the 
 carpet . 
 
this method yielded drawings with an overall resemblance in shape , although smith 
 often failed to recognise ( or intentionally botched ) the referential content of the original 
 picture .
interestingly , the use of a grid for proportion and perspective drawing was also 
 part of art pedagogy , but faced criticism precisely on the grounds that it created 
 superficial likeness without teaching the skills of active , synthetic observation . 
 
the spr s committee on thought - transference had acknowledged the possibility that smith and 
 blackburn were using a secret code , but expressed confidence in their assessment of the 
 men s characters and in the difficulty of cheating .
it is probably no 
 exaggeration to say that several scores , if not hundreds , of precise signs would be required 
 to convey an idea as exact as that conveyed in many of mr smith s representations. 
  indeed , a widely accessible popular literature for aspiring thought - readers provided 
 systems for organising and communicating hundreds of precise signs .
it is likely that smith 
 and blackburn were familiar with such pamphlets , often attributed to famous stage performers 
 such as w. irving bishop and robert houdin . 
 

figure  9:(a )  an alphabetical grid for sending images in the form of a code ; and ( b )  calostro 
 gives an example of how to use the grid to transmit the image of a house . source : 
 calostro ( pseudonym ) , the radio vision mind - reading code ( closter , 
 nj : calostro publications , 1930 ) , 32 . 
 
( a )  an alphabetical grid for sending images in the form of a code ; and ( b )  calostro 
 gives an example of how to use the grid to transmit the image of a house .
source : 
 calostro ( pseudonym ) , the radio vision mind - reading code ( closter , 
 nj : calostro publications , 1930 ) , 32 . the spr quietly dropped the smith and blackburn case from their canon of evidence , but the 
 efforts of both the british and american societies to elicit telepathic drawings from the 
 public had by then established this methodology among amateur researchers who understood it 
 on their own terms , and adapted it to their changing interests . from 1904 until the 1940s , 

french parapsychologist ren warcollier worked with a method similar to the spr s , in which 
 an agent observed a target image and distant percipients tried to draw it .
warcollier s 
  remote viewing experiments were remarkable for their scale and global scope , involving 
 
much like the spr investigators , he was not searching for perfect matches , nor for 
 insight into his subjects psyches .
he believed that analysing discrepancies and 
 resemblances between agent and percipient drawings would reveal the mechanisms of 
 mind - to - mind communication . 
  by 1930 ,
when the novelist upton sinclair published a book of his telepathic drawing 
 experiments entitled mental radio , the popularisation of freudian theory 
 had opened up a wide range of new interpretive possibilities for mental imagery .
yet 
 sinclair largely hewed to the mode of analysis represented by the spr and warcollier , 
 comparing the visual appearance of drawings and sometimes taking into account their manifest 
 content ; only in a few isolated cases did he note the potential impact of the subject s 
 history or emotions on a transmission . 
 
psychical researchers were engaged with the surface level of drawings , looking at 
 their geometric and linear components and the explicit objects or ideas that they 
 represented . like the collectors of children s drawings
, they seemed increasingly nave in 
 their approach from the perspective of psychologists who were either unpacking or working to 
 contain the problem of subjectivity .
after the deflation of the spr s case for telepathy in the first decade of the twentieth 
 century , sceptical psychologists came to expect that , like smith and blackburn and any 
 number of supposed psychic mediums , adults brought complex motives and resources to bear on 
 drawing tasks . understanding these motives would require more art than science , and thus was 
 not particularly useful in the goal of gaining scientific legitimacy for psychical research 
 or for laboratory psychology in general .
psychoanalysis threatened the integrity of drawings 
 as automatic traces of mental processes by throwing open the gates of interpretation . 

however , there remained a special kind of subject whose neuropathologies produced 
 characteristic changes in cognitive function that the act of drawing could make visible .
simple black - and - white line drawings floating on a page of scientific text , labelled with a 
 figure number and caption , helped to define a new area of neuropsychology in the 
 mid - twentieth century .
drawings became evidence of the internal workings of cognitive 
 mechanisms not accessible through more holistic methods of testing and self - report . 

neurologists had used patients drawings to study the mechanics of cognition since the 
 1870s , slowly embracing the notion that these drawings , if elicited under controlled 
 conditions and analysed by the appropriate experts , reveal how localised damage impacts 
 specific pathways in the brain .
neuropsychological literature has typically depicted 
 patients with brain injuries in terms of their cognitive functions , or lack thereof , and , 
 within this literature , patient art is presented as the output of damaged circuits rather 
 than as subjective expression , in much the same way that child study and psychical research 
 carefully circumscribed the agency of their drawing subjects , preferring to depict them as 
 self - recording devices . 
  the german physiologist herman munk is credited with coining the term 
psychic blindness or  mind - blindness , in 1881 based on experiments in which 
 he cauterised specific areas of the cortex in dogs . 
 
dogs with posterior occipital lesions were unable to identify their food bowls or 
 recognise their handlers , although their vision was intact . in 1888 , the neurologist 
 heinrich lissauer examined an eighty - year - old patient , mr gottlieb l. , suffering from a 
 strange array of perceptual problems similar to those displayed by munk s dogs : the patient 
 could see things but could not recognise them , unless allowed to examine them by touch .
he 
 could draw simple copies of pictures shown to him , but could not name the objects 
 represented . 
 
lissauer used drawings to probe his patient s visual processing deficits because 
  verbalization may not be accompanied by visual imagery ... one can get much further by 
 asking people to draw from memory  the same reasoning given by lukens in studying 
 children s conceptual knowledge . 
  based on his extensive work with gottleib l.
, lissauer postulated that psychic 
 blindness resulted from damage to the occipital areas of both hemispheres that prevented the 
 association of visual perceptions with knowledge stored in memory , a condition that sigmund 
 freud , still practising neurology in 1891 , termed agnosia , or 
loss of knowledge. the 
 concept of agnosia  that damage along its processing and integration streams can prevent 
 the brain from connecting sensory input with meaning  raised the possibility of 
 physiologically divorcing vision from comprehension . a patient with this class of disorder 

a canny diagnostician could use the machine s output to 
 locate the point at which normal visual processing had broken down .
interest in cognitive deficits caused by localised neurological injury , specifically in the 
 disorders of language processing called aphasias , surged in the 1850s , as neurologists such 
 as paul broca and carl wernicke pursued the localisation of functions by correlating patient 
 histories with autopsy findings . 
 
broca , wernicke and their peers debated the philosophical implications of language 
 localisation ; aphasia became a way of probing what defines the human and what constitutes a 
 conscious self . 
 
these high - profile aphasia debates are well studied , but few historians of science 
 have engaged with the more recent history of agnosias , beginning with lissauer in the 1880s . 
 unlike aphasia , which was manifested overtly in verbal communication , agnosias were slippery 
 and difficult to observe in the clinical settings of the late nineteenth century . as 
 lissauer noted , accessing patients perceptions required a technique not dependent on 
 language or self - report .
historians have , perhaps , been attracted to nineteenth - century 
 aphasiology because its disruption of the correspondence between language and reality 
 resonates strongly with late twentieth - century disruptions in the discipline of history 
 itself .
agnosia engages more recent historiographic trends , allowing us to extend the 
 narrative of how science has mobilised visual evidence to depict brain functions untethered 
 from human subjects . 
 
while aphasias are specific to the processing and production of language , agnosias 
 encompass broader sensory deficits ranging from impaired face recognition ( prosopagnosia ) to 
 impaired sensory perception of one s own sensory perception disorder ( anosognosia ) .
classification of these disorders has , as researchers inevitably note in their 
 literature reviews on the subject , depended on the availability of patients with highly 
 specific lesions , a rare occurrence given the diffuse damage normally caused by head injury 
 or stroke . 
 
historically , a contingent of neuropsychologists have made the case that 
 categorisation is a useless exercise due to the individualised nature of each patient s 
 difficulties , and that particular classes of agnosia do not exist as clinical entities . 
  in this debate , drawing once again became a decisive tool and evidentiary form .
it 
 helped researchers develop an etiology of agnosias ; the examples given here centre on visual 
 agnosia , but drawing became almost ubiquitous in assessments for a wide range of 
 interrelated sensory perception and processing disorders . 

figure  10:a drawing task with original images on the top line and the patient s copies below . 

source : w. russell brain ,  visual object - agnosia with special reference to the gestalt 
 theory. brain 64 ( 1941 ) , 48 . 
  a drawing task with original images on the top line and the patient s copies below . 

source : w. russell brain ,  visual object - agnosia with special reference to the gestalt 
 theory. brain 64 ( 1941 ) , 48 . tests like that shown in figure  10 , in which a 
 patient was asked to copy three geometric forms , seem to project the subject s faulty 
 perceptual function directly onto the page in a way that requires little interpretation . 
 however , such images are rich with theoretical assumptions and rhetorical strategies that 
 reinforce the immediacy of the drawing as a materialisation of mental processes .
a set of 
 characteristic drawing tasks emerged in european and american clinical neurology in the 
 early twentieth century that relied on a shared visual repertoire of mundane objects , 
 clocks , maps , geometry and perspectival rules .
some newly diagnosable cognitive disturbances 
 were subtle enough that patients compensated for them in everyday life without overt signs 
 of difficulty .
dysfunction was present , however , if a patient was quietly deviating from the 
 normal pathways of image recognition and production built into the cultural practice of 
 drawing .
british neurologist henry head , in his authoritative 1926 work on aphasia , developed four 
 drawing tasks for evaluating the nature of a patient s cognitive disability : drawing from a 
 model , drawing from command ( head generally requested an elephant ) , drawing the ground plan 
 of a familiar room and drawing  anything that [ comes ] to mind. 
  each of these tasks assumed a shared visual grammar rooted in western art and art 
 education .
jacyna , in his biography of head , underscores the importance of head s 
 position at the empire hospital in vincent square during world war i , where he treated 
 young , well - educated officers who had suffered acute head trauma . 
  their social backgrounds and the specific nature of their battle wounds made these 
 patients ideal for isolating 
pure forms of aphasia and agnosia . 
  whereas their presumed naivet made the contents of children s minds easy to capture 
 in drawings , the presumed intellectual soundness of head s patients prior to injury meant 
 that the injury itself was the thing captured in diagnostic drawing tests .
head reproduced 
 their drawings as the only illustrations , aside from x - rays , in his two - volume tome . 

source : henry head , aphasia 
 and kindred disorders of speech ; ( cambridge university press , 1926 ) , 131 ; 
 and ( b )  patient no .
source : henry head , aphasia 
 and kindred disorders of speech ; ( cambridge university press , 1926 ) , 131 ; 
 and ( b )  patient no . 25 s
head is a prominent example of how neurologists in clinical settings developed ad 
 hoc drawing tasks for the evaluation of patients with agnosic symptoms , using 
 logic to connect errors in representation with localised brain damage .
head attempted to 
 create a more generalised set of evaluation criteria , applying a larger number of tests to a 
 larger number of patients than previous researchers had . 
  until this point ,
most agnosia research , like the smith  blackburn experiments , was 
 performed on isolated patients under test conditions that varied depending on the patients 
 responsiveness and abilities . despite head s attempt to impose a standardised diagnostic framework
, there was no 
 professional consensus on the disease categories that various drawing tasks identified until 
 the 1970s . in the 1940s , edinburgh neurologists oliver zangwill and andrew patterson 
 developed a visual testing 
battery for patients suffering from spatial disorientation . by 
 asking patients to bisect lines , copy drawings and mark different times of day on a clock 
 face , they connected the recognised phenomenon of unilateral neglect with specific 
 disruptions in processing caused by unilateral parietal lesions . 
 
their testing battery was widely adopted , and their explanation of unilateral 
 neglect supported a modular view of brain function that would gain increasing acceptance in 
 subsequent decades , building on this model of matching a lesion to a deficit revealed 
 through drawing . 
 
drawing tasks helped researchers distinguish the discrete cognitive operations contributing 
 to patients broader deficits , and refined these cognitive operations into successively 
 narrower categories . throughout the 1950s and 1960s , a group of neuropsychologists argued 
 that cases classed as agnosias did not reflect a specific disorder , but rather resulted from 
 generalised brain damage and decreased cognitive functioning . 
   to my knowledge of the literature , there does not exist a single case of agnosia 
 without elementary sensory disorders and without mental deterioration 
, claimed german 
 neurologist eberhard bay . 
  bay and his supporters insisted that  there is no need to search for any mystical 
 gnostic activity to be disturbed , a point that sometimes led to questioning the 
 intelligence or integrity of agnosic patients such as  schn , a world war i veteran whom bay 
 accused of exaggerating his symptoms . 
 
debates over the  reality of this syndrome were particularly fraught because 
 clinicians also played an advocacy role for their patients , certifying the need for pensions 
 or disability support . 
 
advocates for visual agnosia as an etiologically distinct syndrome used drawings as 
 evidence for a new theory of visual processing , modelling it as a stream that flowed from 
 lower - level perception to stored perceptual knowledge to stored conceptual knowledge . along 
 with a battery of other visual tasks
, drawings helped to delineate a disorder which gained 
 widespread acceptance with the work of george ettlinger , glyn humphreys and jane riddoch 
 from the late 1960s onwards . 
 
 dementia is a convenient label to apply when aspects of behavior are not fully 
 understood , wrote humphreys and riddoch ; for agnosic patients ,  having a problem identified 
 and labeled can be a reassurance. 
  drawings captured patients subtle and disorienting errors in spatial 
 representation , assembling parts into wholes , or recalling the forms of common objects , 
 fixing in material form specific deficits that had once seemed diffuse and intractable .
drawing tests mobilise an arsenal of familiar objects depicted in outline from a 
 conventional point of view , in part , as an accommodation to the perceptual difficulties of 
 neurological patients . 
pictures are much more difficult [ to recognise ] if the artist has 
 used shade , reflection , or the skills of impressionism , reported john , the patient studied 
 by humphreys and riddoch . 
 
this visual vocabulary also dispenses with the subjective problem of artistic 
 expression , aiming , instead , for a conventional sense of accuracy shared by patients and 
 researchers .
i never had much drawing ability 
 or the simplest comprehension of how to show a third dimension in scribbling 
[but ] i can 
 comprehend enough of my own handiwork to know if it is a reasonable representation of what i 
 had in mind. 
  john s ability to produce a drawing and then reflect on its correspondence with an 
 objective reference point acts as an assurance that he has no special training or expressive 
 intentions  he is a subject appropriately constrained in his use of drawing as an extension 
 of pure cognitive function . batteries of drawing tests helped clinicians order lesions by location and construct a 
 theory of the processing stream , in the same way that ordering children s drawings along a 
 developmental sequence enabled psychologists to construct an evaluative framework based on 
 that sequence . throughout these debates ,
neurologists recognised that deficits and lesions 
 rarely match in a simple one - to - one correspondence because injuries are rarely limited to a 
 single - function area of the brain ; patients often suffer from a combination of difficulties 
 following an injury . however , once the disorder 
agnosia emerged as a medical category , 
 neurologists could use the techniques developed in establishing the diagnosis to 
 disaggregate symptoms and locate damaged points on the visual processing stream .
this systematic use of patient drawings in an experimental context to illuminate 
 fundamental cognitive processes rests on the same material substrate as the spr s 
 experiments with smith and blackburn and g. stanley hall s catalogue of the child mind . 

though not an intentional continuation of these practices , it reveals how the 
 epistemological assumptions built into supposedly basic psychomotor tasks have shaped 
 different areas of psychology in similar ways .
drawing seemed a reliable means to capture 
 the mental processes of particular kinds of subject while bypassing the unruliness of 
 subjectivity . in each of the examples above ,
researchers identified subjects who they 
 believed could function as object - instruments capable of faithfully recording the desired 
 mental phenomena .
nave children , blindfolded mediums and head trauma victims , equipped with 
 pencil and paper , could act as their own 
soul catchers  in the sense of a material 
 assemblage that fixes an ephemeral quality of the mind in a physical form .
however , the goal 
 of this process for researchers was to take what is conventionally understood as the  soul 
 out of the picture , leaving a pure mental function traced in black and white . much of the literature on scientific illustration and objectivity focuses on the production 
 of images by experts , whether scientists , technicians or artists , disciplined to act as 
 
transparent recording media for the phenomena they observed . 
  the subjectivity of the image maker is not intended to be part of the image s 
 scientific meaning , although , of course , it is integral to the social and cultural 
 construction of that meaning . on the other hand , certain image - making practices in 
 psychology are understood to externalise important clues about the patient s subjectivity 
 that can be interpreted for purposes of diagnosis and therapy .
the images of mental function 
 and dysfunction discussed above occupy a strange intermediate space .
they did not illustrate observed 
 phenomena , but rather manifested hidden mental phenomena in visible form . nor were they 
 interpreted for emotional content  rather , their scientific validity depended on the 
 exclusion of meaning , history and individual voice .
researchers in vastly different contexts 
 elicited these drawings aiming to make an objective study of subjectivity and to access the 
 mind through the hand .
 researchers in the mind sciences often look to the production and analysis of drawings to 
 reveal the mental processes of their subjects . 
 this essay presents three episodes that 
 trace the emergence of drawing as an instrumental practice in the study of the mind . 
 between 1880 and 1930 
 , drawings gained currency as a form of scientific evidence  as 
 stable , reproducible signals from a hidden interior . 
 i begin with the use of drawings as 
 data in the child study movement , move to the telepathic transmission of drawings in 
 psychical research and conclude with the development of drawing as an experimental and 
 diagnostic tool for studying neurological impairment . despite significant shifts in the 
 theoretical and disciplinary organisation of the mind sciences in the early twentieth 
 century , researchers attempted to stabilise the use of subject - generated drawings as 
 evidence by controlling the contexts in 
 which drawings were produced and reproduced , and 
 crafting subjects whose interiority could be effectively circumscribed . 
 while movements 
 such as psychoanalysis and art therapy would embrace the narrative interpretation of 
 patient art , neuropsychology continued to utilise drawings as material traces of cognitive 
 functions . 
Child Drawings
Telepathic Drawings
Neuropathological Drawings
Conclusion