THE ART AND SCIENCE OF PEOPLE

People are simultaneously very simple and incredibly complex. A few major desires govern most of our doings: after obtaining food and safety, we want respect, belonging, and sex. I believe a sixth one is an innate urge most of us have to be good at something, to have expertise – in short, mastery.

            But take any six factors and multiply them times each other, and you get thousands of permutations (combinations). And of course there is the possibility that someone else has a different short list of the Top Six. (For instance, the urge to procreate. I’m personally not influenced by a desire to reproduce myself; never have been. But plenty of other people are). This kaleidoscope of combinations explains why there are so many strange human styles and behaviors. Sometimes it seems there are too many to understand – especially when you read about people who spend decades doing something weird like writing the bible on the head of a pin, or enjoying being cruel to others. So over the centuries people have tried to classify us, putting us into a small collection of boxes to make sense of it all.

            You already know about astrology, the system that puts all human beings into twelve types of personality. There are other typologies – psychoanalysis, the enneagram, bioenergetics, Myers-Briggs, and so on. But these systems are different from each other. Who’s right?

            My answer: They all describe something real. Think of clusters. The six needs and the dozens of defense mechanisms and the hundreds of combinations can’t possibly be resolved into a few perfect categories that account for billions of human beings. Each person who attempts to categorize looks through a particular lens and notices clusters of traits, which look to him or her like a True Type of Person. Maybe by sheer luck he or she happened upon a bunch of people who did share a profile. (During the 25 years I was a psychotherapist, I would sometimes have odd little clusters: for a while I would get a lot of nurses with bulimia, then a series of biracial couples with boundary issues, then a series of perfectionistic athletes. Trying to proclaim a law based on these random series would have been simply trying to sculpt clouds).

            Categories are useful – to a point. The categorizer really did see something, but it really does represent only some of all the people alive. It’s a mistake to accept any category as a perfect and complete diagnosis. The map, while useful, is not the territory. That’s why it takes both art and science to understand us. Below I explain some of the aspects of human nature about which I have some expertise.

Psychology and psychotherapy

Eating disorders

Cults    

The family passenger

Ecopsychology