What the House Tree Person Manual Actually Covers
The House-Tree-Person test is a projective drawing assessment where a subject is asked to draw three things: a house, a tree, and a person. The manual for scoring it is not one single book. It is a collection of interpretive frameworks that have accumulated since Kohs and Machover started writing about it in the 1940s and 50s. Most people looking for a manual want a scoring key. There is no single correct scoring key, which is the first thing you need to understand before you spend any money or time. A proper manual gives you administration instructions, scoring categories, and normative data. The original Machover manual from 1949 laid out the basic framework. Later versions by Burns and Kok or by Hammer added more structured coding systems. If you are buying or downloading a manual, check that it includes administration guidelines, not just interpretation tables. A manual without administration instructions is almost useless because the way you present the test changes what you get back. Here is how I actually use it in practice. I give the subject a blank white paper and a #2 pencil. No eraser. I say, "Draw a house." Then "Draw a tree." Then "Draw a person." That is it. I do not give them an eraser because if they erase, it changes the dynamics. The act of erasing is data. I watch what they do with the pencil, where they start on the page, how long they sit before making a mark. The drawing itself is only part of what the manual covers. The behavior around the drawing matters just as much.
I ran into a specific problem a while back with a client who drew an extremely tiny house in the upper right corner of the page, then proceeded to erase it so many times that the paper tore. A beginner using a surface-level manual would flag this as withdrawal and avoidance. The fuller manual pointed out that the erasing created a kind of smudged gray mass that shifted the interpretation. The paper tear itself became a boundary symbol. I had to look at multiple manuals to piece together what was actually happening. The workaround was to photograph the paper before any tearing occurred, then analyze the sequence of lines rather than just the final image. Most cheap PDFs you find online will not tell you to do this. They show you a static image and a checklist. Real assessment is dynamic. One counter-intuitive thing that beginners always miss is the order effect. The manual will tell you the standard order is house, tree, person. But the order matters more than most scorers admit. If you reverse it and ask for person first, the responses change. I once compared two administrations with the same subject on different days using different orders. The person drawing was drastically different between the two sessions, and it was not due to any psychological shift. It was purely due to the priming effect of having drawn the house and tree first. The subject had already warmed up to the task and their defense structure lowered by the third drawing regardless of what the third drawing was. This is something you will not find in most summary guides. It is in the older, more detailed manuals, buried in footnotes. Another nuance that tends to get glossed over is how pen versus pencil changes the scoring. Some newer manuals acknowledge this. Some do not. Pencil allows for pressure variation and erasing. Ballpoint pen does not. Gel ink sits on top of the paper differently. If your manual does not account for medium differences, it is not a complete manual. I stopped using pencil for routine assessments about three years ago and switched to black ballpoint pen because it forced more decisive marks. The subject could not pretend to be uncertain by going back and forth with an eraser. This cut my administration time from about forty-five minutes down to roughly twenty minutes per session, and the data quality actually improved because the drawings were more committed.
Here are the main components you should expect in a legitimate House Tree Person Manual: Administration protocol. How to introduce the test, what to say verbatim, how to handle silence, how to handle questions like "Can I use an eraser?" The standard response to that question is no, and the manual should explain why. If it does not, that is a red flag about the quality of the manual. Scoring categories. Line quality, pressure, shading, placement on the page, size, integration of parts, specific details like windows and doors on the house, roots and trunk on the tree, facial features and limbs on the person. Each category has a range of possible meanings depending on context. The manual should make that clear. Any manual that gives you a one-to-one mapping like "no feet means X" is doing you a disservice. Context is everything in projective assessment.
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Normative data. What is typical for different age groups. A child's house drawing is fundamentally different from an adult's. A manual without age norms is incomplete. The Machover manual had some norms. Burns and Kok expanded them. More recent compilations have tried to update these, but the literature is fragmented. There is no single authoritative norm table that every clinician agrees on. Reliability and validity sections. This is where most manuals fall short. The HTP test has moderate reliability at best. Test-retest reliability for individual scorers ranges from about 0.55 to 0.75 depending on which scoring system you use. Inter-rater reliability is consistently lower than most people want to admit. A rigorous manual will state these numbers plainly. A promotional manual will cite only the studies that support its claims. Read the methodology sections of any cited studies before you buy into a scoring system. The biggest limitation of the HTP and its manuals is that it is easy to over-interpret. I have seen clinicians spend twenty minutes decoding the angle of a tree branch as if it were a cipher. Most of the time, the angle of that branch meant nothing. The subject drew it quickly because they wanted to move on. The human tendency is to find meaning where there is none. This is called apophenia and it is the single biggest threat to valid HTP interpretation. A good manual will warn you about this explicitly. Most do not.
Another scenario where the HTP fails entirely is with subjects who have motor impairments or visual deficits. A manual should address accommodations, but very few do. If a subject has cerebral palsy or poor eyesight, their drawings will look clinically significant even when they are not. The drawings reflect the impairment, not the personality. I learned this the hard way with a patient who had mild dystonia. Every line trembled. Every window was misaligned. A naive scorer would have flagged psychosis or severe anxiety. The reality was a motor coordination issue. The workaround is to always take a thorough medical and developmental history before administering the test. The manual should be read alongside clinical interview data, not in isolation. If you are looking to acquire a manual, the Burns and Kok "Clinical Applications of the House-Tree-Person Test" remains one of the more thorough options available. The original Machover text is out of print but you can find PDFs online. Be careful with free PDFs. Many are scanned poorly, some are incomplete editions, and a few are not from legitimate publishers at all. I once downloaded what I thought was the full Hammer manual and it turned out to be a thirty-page excerpt with the scoring tables removed. That happened to be the most important part of the book. For anyone serious about using this assessment, I would recommend pairing the manual with supervised practice. You should adminster at least fifty drawings under the guidance of someone who knows what they are doing before you feel confident interpreting them. The gap between reading a manual and actually using it is wider than most training programs acknowledge. I spent about six months just drawing houses, trees, and people myself to understand what a novice drawer produces. That baseline helped me calibrate my scoring much faster than any manual could.
The manual is a starting point, not a solution. The test requires clinical judgment, pattern recognition across multiple indicators, and a willingness to admit when you do not know what you are looking at. No manual can replace that. It can only help you structure your observations so you are not making things up as you go along.
