Re-Modeling the Mind: Personality in Balance

ISBN-13: 9780983181026 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 354 str.

Ruth a. Johnston

Opis

Re-Modeling the Mind: Personality in Balance starts with a challenging proposition: what if human personality is best understood by looking first at nature and animals? We know that nature's systems are self-balancing, and we know that insects, animals, birds, and even micro-organisms are born knowing things. I use Carl Jung's ideas about personality, but in departure from other explanations of Jung, I think that when he said "introversion," he was talking about the parts of our mind that are born "knowing things" the way animals do. Like animals, humans need to know how to keep themselves safe, as soon after birth as possible. The greatest danger to a baby comes from adult humans, so a baby's inborn knowledge helps him know when the people around him are safe. We carry a template of safety and danger all our lives, and it develops detail as we learn about the world. But our templates aren't the same; although each one is individual and unique, we can hypothesize some types of templates. That's where my model of personality starts, with four kinds of inborn ideals of what a safe world looks like. I'm using the same personality categories that readers may have met in the Myers-Briggs personality type system, but I'm defining what they mean a little bit differently. Some of what I talk about appears in advanced Myers-Briggs teaching, but I talk about it as the building blocks. There's a chapter with personality profiles, but a reader who has read the preceding chapters will already know exactly what, how and why the personalities are laid out. By organizing personality around innate, instinctive ideas, I can see some patterns in the standard personality types that aren't otherwise evident. In Re-Modeling the Mind, I identify two polarities of moral conscience and four basic views of the world (like camera lenses we look through to see our own reality). Looking at relationships among personalities, I see four levels of dominance that are innate and inescapable. By combining all of these factors, my framework can point out some typical, hard-to-solve relationship problems. Last, I suggest an ideal romantic match for those who are seeking someone. Re-Modeling the Mind asks you to understand human personality by first setting aside practical concerns and learning to see patterns that probably aren't visible to you yet. You can skip to the chapter on types and profiles, and you'll find interesting, helpful descriptions. But if you are patient in learning to build your own dynamic model of the mind, in your own mind, you'll find that you start seeing explanations and solutions to some of the thorny problems in your life. When you re-model the way you think about the human mind, a lot of things start to look different.