What Is Psychoanalysis?

Almost one-hundred years ago...

When the Swiss canton of Luzern wanted to solve a crime or even a murder mystery, they would call in the local psychologist.

He would then interview the suspect, and it went like this:

He would blurt out a series of words, A LOT of words, sometimes over one-hundred words...

And the suspect would have to answer as fast as possible, with "whatever pops into your head".

Now what the suspect, or better said interviewee, did not know, is that the psychologist was counting the RESPONSE TIME, in seconds, to each word. He did this by secretly tapping the fingers of his right hand against his trouser leg, out of sight of the interviewee.

The answers were not important at all, the response time was everything.

Also very important were the words.

Out of one-hundred totally mundane words like "dog", "yellow", or "ground", he would sprinkle them with emotionally charged words like "knife", "strangle", or even "murder".

After the test was done he would then plot out the graph of words with response times.

The spikes in the response times were tell tales of death.

Often, he could easily do it in his head, then he would end the session with a statement like this: 

"Well sir, it's easy to see; you got mad at your wife who threatened to divorce you, and strangled her to death..."

He solved every case he was called in to solve -- 100%.

The man's name was Carl Gustav Jung (sorry! it wasn't Sigmund!) and he went on to become the great contemporary and then rival of Sigmund Freud.

Now... hold on a second...
I do not propose that you go out and solve murder mysteries with the BE FREUD drawing test...

-BUT-

A drawing, made under the right circumstances, and in the right -controlled- environment can be even MORE revealing than a series of word associations!

The story above was paraphrased from the book
"The Essential Jung" by Storr.

More details HERE.