Actions, Styles and Symbols in Kinetic Family Drawings (K-F-D) by Robert C. Burns, S. Harvard Kaufman (review)

Books 377 Francisco Art Institute. It is preceded by an introduction written by Director, Fred Martin, a most dynamic personality whose vitality and love of the school permeate the introduction. He calls the school ‘the collective fantasy of everyone entangled in it’. And, entangled they are, from trustees to faculty, staff and students. ‘Our first care is for culture, for the creation of art. Our second care is for education, the economy of the spirit which naturally arises from the production of art in a community of creative men.’ In this ambiance, the author-director of research and his fellow psychologists, W. B. Hall and R. H. Knapp, together with research assistants, give of themselves in various capacities to probe the questions of aesthetic judgment, talent, creativity and choice of career and education. Talks and interviews with selected students are supported by questionnaires, psychological tests and sociopsychological analyses. Referring to the first results of this tentative collaboration , Martin, quite objectively, airs his thoughts. ‘Can the psychologist indeed help the artist? I do not know.’ While research studies may raise more questions than they answer, I take the more positive view that psychologists do have much to contribute. One has but to read the final chapter, ‘A College of Aesthetic Education’, to feel some of that vital energy necessary in the development of a new kind of college devoted specificallyto aesthetic education-an educational effort based on the ‘cluster college’ concept at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where Barron fulfils his role as Professor of Psychology. At the moment, the college is more experiment than reality as a new force in education, one hopefully basically different from traditional art colleges. Changing the fabric of education, from nursery school through to college itself, is a large order. ‘It may very well need a new kind of student as well as a new curriculum and a faculty with a new perspective on general education.’ Research is under way on the kind of students the college is attracting, as well as ‘the crucial issue of the effect of the curriculum on the students’. With dedicated research psychologists, such as Barron and other educators, imbued with the spirit of art, I have a strong inner belief that the college will break through to accomplishment-contrary to the old adage, ‘plus Fa change, plus c‘est la meme chose’. Actions, Styles and Symbols in Kinetic Family Drawings (K-F-D). Robert C. Burns and S. Harvard Kaufman. Brunner/Mazel, New York, 1972. 304 pp., illus. $12.50. Reviewed by Peter Fingestenl This book is a perfect example of the danger of interpreting art, even though the drawings are by disturbed children and the interpreters are trained psychologists. After one has read the book, including the short, self-congratulatory introduction by Louise Bates Ames, one realizes how naive psychoanalysts are when it comes to art, excepting, of course, masters like Otto Rank, Ernst Kris and Anton Ehrenzweig. Artists would never have the impunity to pontificate about psychology as most psychoanalysts and psychologists pontificate about the alleged symbolic meaning of art. We find this book simplistic and an example of extreme hubris. It is an ideal office coffee table book for child psychologists, large in format, very little text and many illustrations. K-F-D are drawings in which children reveal their family constellation, that is, their relationships to parents and siblings through actions and movements. The authors have managed between them to come up with only a onepage introduction. Chapter I consists of a half-page introduction and short summations of four psychological drawing tests with one illustration. Chapter VI contains six examples of normal K-F-D, another half-page introduction and thin explanations, often no more than one paragraph-and so on through the entire book. As a *Pace College,41Park Row, NewYork. NY 10003,U.S.A. matter of fact, the extreme brevity of the explanations of the illustrations seem to prove that the authors are not familiar with descriptive techniques that must precede any kind of interpretation. Some of these drawings have been touched up and details in certain plates show different media, surely not pencil No. 2, as claimed in the...