Projective drawings

This book explores the use of a well-known projective drawing technique, Draw a Person in the Rain, in combination with a follow-up exercise I created called Draw a Person in the Rain with Changes. I sometimes refer to the combination of the two as the two-part exercise. I used this exercise with male adolescent offenders in open and closed custody facilities order to help me understand their personality traits and defensive blocking styles more quickly.
When I came to work at the open custody facility for juvenile offenders I knew that I would be working with a notoriously defensive, resistant population with whom I would only be allowed to spend half an hour a week for a few weeks or, at most, a few months. Therefore, I felt that it would be beneficial, to both myself and the young offenders, to use a tool that could help reveal quickly what lay beneath the defenses they manifested. By achieving this, I hoped to be able to improve the self-awareness of the youths before they left custody and returned to the difficult environments from which they had come in order to give them a better chance to avoid re-offending.
Over the years when I used this two-part exercise, I rarely asked the youth to do the drawings in a systematic, “scientific, or methodological” way. For instance, some of the drawings were done on very large pieces of paper, others were done on small pieces, and in a few cases both drawings were done on one sheet. I also let the youth choose…