Transparencies in Children's Human Figure Drawings: A Developmental Approach

Abstract

Transparencies are x-ray type representations which often appear in young children's drawings. For example, in drawing a person, a child may show both the clothing and the body parts underneath, or in drawing a house, he may allow us to peer through the walls at the furniture and people inside. Such pictures occur cross-culturally in children's art and have been found in representations by adults from pre-technological societies (Lark-Horovitz, Lewis, & Luca, 1967; Sully, 1903). Although in the clinical assessment of children transparencies in drawings are considered to reflect impulsivity, concretism, immaturity, and acting-out (Koppitz, 1968; Machover, 1949), little is known about the cognitive and perceptual processes underlying them. A better understanding of the determinants of errors such as transparencies should lead to a more comprehensive theory of drawing behavior in normal children and might shed more light on their diagnostic significance in clinical settings. Theoretically, several hypotheses have been proposed to account for these processes, including intellectual realism (Piaget & Inhelder, 1967: Harris, 1963), children's interests and ideas of what