psychograph

English

Etymology

From psycho- +‎ -graph.

Noun

psychograph (plural psychographs)

1. One of various graphical representations of a cognitive or psychological profile.
   • 1921, Bulletin of the National Research Council, page 482:

     The chaplains' psychograph is notable because of the extreme variation in scores; thus on test 4 (opposites) the chaplains achieve a median score which is much higher than that of any other group, whereas on tests 2 (arithmetic) and 6 (number series completion) they fall considerably below the median for all officers.

   • 2000, William E. Martin, Jr., Jody L. Swartz-Kulstad, Person-Environment Psychology and Mental Health, →ISBN:

     Psychographs could be used to describe the occupation as well as the person.

   • 2007, Ken Wilber, Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World, page 9:

     The psychograph also helps us spot the ways that virtually all of us are unevenly developed, and this helps prevent us from thinking that just because we are terrific in one area we must be terrrific in all the others.

   • 2012, Andre Marquis, The Integral Intake, →ISBN:

     Depending on how psychologically minded a given client is, therapists can explain the idea of developmental levels and lines to that client and ask her to sketch a psychograph depicting, for example, her cognitive, moral, interpersonal, affective, and spiritual lines of development.

   • 2013, A. A. Roback, The Psychology Of Character, →ISBN:

     From the purely psychological approach, the psychograph had been developed both in France as early as 1896, by Toulouse, and in Germany, a few years later, by Stern, as an abbreviated description of a given individual's personality.

2. (spiritualism) A photographic image having a supposed supernatural or spiritual origin
   • 1920, The London - Volume 44, page 443:

     In this article he deals with the still more remarkable impressions, known as "psychographs," which they have obtained on photographic plates without exposing them at all, and which Mr. Lethem claims could only be produced by "spirit" agency.

   • 1938, True Mystic Science - Volumes 1-2, page 21:

     A remarkably clear psychograph — a thought-picture — was taken, or impressed, upon a plate in Hope's home without the plate being exposed to light.

   • 1986, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Michael Gibson, Richard Lancelyn Green, Letters to the press: the unknown Conan Doyle, page 295:

     Such a psychograph - and I believe the normal psychic photograph is such - is independent of the laws of light, so that one can imagine how utterly at sea a photographic critic would be who judged its authenticity by shadows or any such tests.

   • 2012, Fabrice Bourland, The Baker Street Phantom, →ISBN:

     Seven years after he began organising regular séances with Miss Poole, Dr. Hamilton managed to obtain his first so-called psychograph or spirit photograph.

   • 2013, Kristen Lacefield, The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in The Ring, →ISBN, page 36:

     In 1915, for example, the British photographer William Hope made a "psychograph" that contained handwritten messages from two disembodied spirits, and Coates confirmed that the "writing attributed to the late Archdeacon Colley and Mr. William Walker is identical with their own handscript while they were in life."

3. (spiritualism) Any of various devices used for automatic writing.
   • 1971, Kurt E. Koch, Occult Practices and Beliefs, →ISBN, page 94:

     A psychograph or a planchette is an apparatus used in spiritistic circles as an instrument for receiving written messages from the spirits of the dead.

   • 2001, Patricia Howe, Helen Chambers, Theodor Fontane and the European Context, →ISBN:

     ln a very well-known utterance, the novelist said of Effi Briest (with that curious pellucidity which has no grain of vanity in it): "Perhaps I have been so successful with it because l wrote the whole novel in a dream-like state, almost as if with a psychograph" - a psychograph being the pen-like implement used in spiritualistic ghost-writing.

   • 2012, Eduard von Hartmann, C. C. Massey, Spiritism, →ISBN, page 66:

     Yet more surprising are the results if recourse be had to the table, for rapping, or to the psychograph, requiring, it is true, longer practice than the divinging rod.

4. Any of various devices that purportedly read a person's thoughts.
   • 2005, Micki McGee, Self Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life, →ISBN:

     The psychograph was a novelty device featured in department stores and theater lobbies during the depression of the 1930s. The machine was used to measure the bumps on an individual's head and, according to the principles of the pseudoscience of phrenology, said to reveal the subject's personality and most suitable vocation.

   • 2005, Robert Mandelberg, Easy Mind-Reading Tricks, →ISBN, page 81:

     A psychograph was a machine that was invented in the early 1900s to read people's thoughts. The first machine, introduced in 1931, contained almost 2,000 parts.

   • 2010, Jeff Brown, Mark Fenske, The Winner's Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success, →ISBN:

     And then there was the psychograph, which for just ten cents scanned a fairgoer's brain.

   • 2012, Alexander Cannon, The Invisible Influence, →ISBN:

     Under the auspices of the Medical Research Council, the research with my psychograph records all types of thought in graph form.

   • 2013, David Trippett, Wagner's Melodies: Aesthetics and Materialism in German Musical Identity, →ISBN, page 86:

     Indeed, the appeal of the psychograph for early commentators rested partly on the assumption that anyone could tap into their "genius" to some extent.

5. psychobiography
   • 1998, Thomas J. Rowland, George B. McClellan and Civil War History, →ISBN:

     Thus, any attempt to write a biography of McClellan inevitably "devolves into a psychograph."

   • 2001, Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought, →ISBN:

     Small wonder then, with this psychograph, that I project my personal history into its inevitable rationalization as cultural pluralism and value relativism, with a not too orthodox reaction to the American way of life.

   • 2016, Carl Rollyson, Biography: An Annotated Bibliography, →ISBN:

     Selections from Strachey, Ludwig, Guedalla, Bradford, Maurois, Nicholson, and others representing various kinds of short biography: narrative, character analysis or psychograph, narrative and criticism, episodic narrative, and other combinations of narrative, exposition, and analysis.

6. A piece of prose that describes hallucinations or phantoms.
   • 1987, Maria F. Bennett, Unfractioned Idiom: Hart Crane and Modernism, page 175:

     For Jolas, the modern poet's function involved a rediscovery of the vertical elements in creation, establishing through art a "Sense of the miraculous" through new forms such as the "anamyth" (a narrative of what he termed "preconscious relationships") and the "psychograph" (a hallucinatory prose text), both classifications which he might have used to describe Crane's The Bridge.

   • 1996, Ann Elizabeth Mayer, Artists in Dylan Thomas's Prose Works: Adam Naming and Aesop Fabling, →ISBN:

     In its final form it might be a phatasmagoric mixture of the poem in prose, the popular tale of folklore, the psychograph, the essay, the myth, the saga, the humoresque.

   • 2001, Rama Kundu, Thomas Hardy:A Critical Spectrum, →ISBN, page 64:

     Whatever happens within a fictional world has to happen somewhere, even within a psychograph; but there is no space with so rich plurisignificance in the entire range of the Victorian novel than Egdon Heath in Hardy's Return of the Native.

7. A photograph, film, or other recorded image that evokes the feeling of a person, time, or place.
   • 1978, Charles Edward Eaton, The Case of the Missing Photographs, page 72:

     Those eyes seemed to be looking through peepholes forged in the intractable stuff of life itself, and they suggested light, light, light, projected out of the brain pan into a radiance such as one had on a perfect New England summer day. It was the painting beneath the Hopper picture — they came together, not incongruously, as a psychograph of Aline's struggle, and yes, he would use the term, unacknowledged victory.

   • 2004, Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt am Main, Stanley Kubrick, page 31:

     However, the main focus of the film is not on creating a psychograph of an epoch and its people, but on how images can make a statement about the reality of an era.

   • 2005, Pelagia Kyriazi, Magakles Rogakos, Pelagia Kyriazi: psychographs:

     Psychographs consist of photographs that are processed in multiple layers with insertions and excisions, as happens when editing poetry. They relate in terms of their poetic atmosphere and their anthropocentric content. Psychographs, in their variety, let unfold the story of three persons, Kyriazi's family.

Verb

psychograph (third-person singular simple present psychographs, present participle psychographing, simple past and past participle psychographed)

1. To produce a psychograph (any sense).
   • 2013, Vicente Dobroruka, Second Temple Pseudepigraphy, →ISBN:

     That his personal level of instruction was very low is a well-known fact – and has the effect of enhancing the results of his psychographed poetry.

   • 2016, Wanderley Oliveira, Inner restoration with no pain, →ISBN:

     See the message “Atitude de Amor” (Acts of Love, in a free translation) in psychic work “Seara Bendita”, by various spirits, psychographed by mediums Maria José Costa and Wanderley S. Oliveira.

   • 2017, Wolfgang Kellert, Beyond What Matters: Do You Know What You Believe?, →ISBN:

     In 1952, Chico psychographed two books in two days: Rotero (172 pages) and Our Father (104 pages).

Related terms

• psychobiographer
• psychographic