`Little house` of an abused girl
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DECEMBER 25, 2015 08:16.
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In clinical psychology, the H-T-P test is a test for reading the mind through pictures. It was designed by American psychologist John Buck (1903-1983) in 1948. The test analyzes a person`s psychological condition and personality projected in pictures by having a person draw the all-familiar house, tree and person on a piece of paper and asking various questions. The test appeared on some popular television programs to become hot issues in town.
The HTP test is particularly useful on children who have limited ability for linguistic expressions. Even though a child does not speak, he or she can show the inner self through pictures he or she draws. Psychologists can grasp how a child interacts with the parents through a picture of a house and what kind of image the child has about himself or herself through a tree picture one paints. In particular, pictures of people show the psychology of a child toward people around him or her.
The size of a picture is an important standard for evaluation. An 11-year-old girl who has been abused by her father for a long period of time drew a 2-centimeter-by 3-centimeter house during an interview with Shin Eui-jin, a psychologist-turned lawmaker of the ruling Saenuri Party. The tree she drew on other pieces of paper were also very small. The house and the trees were placed on the left side of the paper. Kim Sun-hyun, a professor and art therapist at the Bundang Cha Hospital, said that the too small a house and trees in consideration of the size of the paper indicates her psychological shrinkage and isolation. "In particular, the left-leaning location of the house and the trees suggest her emotion stuck to the past," she said.
The girl, who escaped from her abusing father by climbing down a gas pipe from her home on December 12, was just 120 centimeters tall and weighed 16 kilograms at the time of her rescue. The pictures drawn by the girl whose growth stopped at age 7 due to her family`s abuse look unusual even to the eyes of laypeople. The pictures are so heartbreaking because they are like a silent shout about her painful times. When she was rescued, she said the food she wanted to eat the most was a pizza from the memories of eating crumbs left by her father a year ago. She wanted a doll for Christmas. We resent the people who cruelly trampled on the girl`s basic wish to be loved by her parents. It is our duty to pay warm attention to her until she forgets the time of abuse and start to communicate with the world again.