The Cube is a fun psychological way to find out more about yourself. If you’d like to give it a try yourself or analyse someone else, only read the instructions, not the interpretation until the drawing is done.
Instructions:
Take an A4 piece of paper and draw the following:
A desert
This can be somewhere you’ve been, someplace you’ve seen in pictures, or a pure fantasy. What does the landscape look like? What can you see?
In this desert, there is a cube.
How big is the cube?
What color? Texture? What is it made of?
Is it sitting flat on the sand, or in a different position?
How far is it from you?
Is it solid or hollow? How much does it weigh? (Remember, it’s okay if you don’t know the answer!)
Think about the mood it conveys as well as how it looks.
In this desert, there is also a ladder.
What is it made of? What is its texture? Is it old or new?
About how many rungs does it have – a few, several, many?
Where is it in relation to the cube?
Now, in this desert, there is also a horse.
What kind of horse is it? What color?
Where is it in relation to the cube and the ladder? What is it doing?
Does it have a saddle or bridle, or not? If so, what kind?
Somewhere in this desert, there is a storm.
What kind of storm is it?
Where do you see it?
Does it affect the cube, the ladder, and the horse at all? If so, how?
Is it coming toward you, heading away from you, or stationary?
Is it dangerous or not?
And finally, in this desert, there are flowers.
Where are the flowers?
Are there a few, or many?
What color are they, what kind?
Where are they in relation to the cube, the ladder, and the horse?
Your cube is complete.
Interpretation:
The Desert is your life, or how you view the world. It sets the stage.
Is it a hospitable place with plenty of water, and shade? Or is it hostile, bare, perhaps studded with prickly cacti? Is it level and monotonous, or would you call it serene? Or is it a dramatic landscape of cliffs and gullies?
Can you sum up the feel in a single word?
Certain elements tend to mean certain things across the board. Remember, if this feels wrong, search for your own personal association with an object. For example, mountains are said to represent spirituality, but for me (an atheist who grew up in the Rockies) they represent home, and a sense of comfort and security. This is your mental landscape, so make sure you take the time to discover what interpretation is right for you, personally.
The Cube is you.
The Realist
{practicality, competence, versatility, literal-mindedness, complacency, cynicism}
The realist’s cube sits flat on the sand, the most common position. Realists are competent, capable, and fully engaged in the world. The stackable shape of the cube also suggests a comfort with social reality – getting along, belonging, fitting in – although extreme size or spatial isolation may qualify this.
Realists are not escapists – whatever personal problems or disappointments, they continue to take care of business. They are fully reconciled with what Freud called the reality principle – the acceptance of things as they are in order to make them somewhat more as we wish.
The Ladder stands for all the important people in your life with whom you aren’t intimately physical. The people linked to you through your body – your lover and children – appear in the desert as living things. The people linked to you by friendship or work show up as a familiar and trusty object, the ladder. Sometimes the ladder also stands for your family or origin, a set of once volatile-relationships that often cool to the solid state of friendship in adulthood.
A ladder’s usefulness is a good metaphor for our practical interdependence with others, both in private life and at work.
The Horse represents your lover – unlike the relatively stable cube and ladder, a living, breathing creature that comes with responsibility and unpredictability, and breath-catching beauty.
In addition to portraying a past or present lover through the subjective lens of your mind, the horse can also represent your lover archetype, which H. G. Wells called “the Lover-Shadow.” Such an image is a template for most of our romantic choices.
Just a note: the sex of your horse should not be taken at face-value.
The Storm represents difficulty, problems, and turmoil in your life.
It can show past trouble, but can also be used for forecasting. Where is trouble in your life right now? What type of trouble? How does trouble affect you?
The storm is not always entirely negative. Water is nourishing, wind and thunder are exciting, sandstorms sculpt graceful dunes, lightning can strike revelation or shock your heart. And even the worst storms pass, often followed by rainbows of hope and flowers of creative renewal.
Flowers represent children. The literal interpretation is obvious in the case of parents, but people who don’t have or even don’t want children get flowers too. Flowers can be friends’ kids, nieces and nephews, etc. Teachers can have classrooms of flowers. Doctors and other caregivers “tend” to their patients. Agents want their clients’ careers to “grow.” Salespeople “cultivate” their contacts and accounts.
Furthermore flowers need not even be humans. They can be pets. Or they represent our ideas, creations, or achievements as a flowering of our being.
Colloquially, the flowers are “your baby.” Whatever that is.
I hope you found out a few interesting things that you didn’t know or weren’t aware of. For a more detailed analysis visit the website mentioned below.
Mandy X
Source: https://zombierom.com/cube/cubeyourself.html
Author: Mandy Kloppers
Mandy is a qualified therapist who treats depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD, trauma, and many other types of mental health issues. She provides online therapy around the world for those needing support and also provides relationship counselling.
