Product Description

Is it possible to know in advance who is going to make a good friend? Does looking for an ideal partner make any sense? Are we naturally attracted to those who would make our best partners? We are pre-occupied with these questions, and finding answers to them would take us along way towards happiness. Can they be answered? In the field of human personality, Essential Personalities is a new book giving us fresh insights into what these questions really mean and how to answer them. Essential Personalities is the story of an independent researcher's enquiry into the nature of the human personality and the mating bond, how it evolved and what changes the future may have in store for us as we absorb the cultures of artificial intelligence. Essential Personalities is an exciting and fresh style of popular science book. The author has adapted real-life conversations with two women in his life to describe the development of his ideas. The springboard of a second voice gives his arguments a forward momentum and an attractive rhythm. The narrative begins in conversation with a psychologist talking about the relationship errors that we make. The author goes on to analyse individuality and the nature of empathy and he composes a personality method to poke fun at familiar systems of personality typing like astrology. But he ends with a puzzle - a system of human typing system that appears to work beautifully. From here the author, beginning a new relationship of his own, delves into evolutionary biology, altruism, climate change and mating strategies and comes to the conclusion that an integrated personality is a recent evolutionary adaption in humans in response to the cycles of day and night during the solar year. The resulting series of changes in our brains give us new personality fundamentals which enable us to both move away from our genetic kin and to make relationships with strangers more attractive to us and more possible. The system contributed to the explosive growth of humans by allowing for wider possibilities in the mating partnership, and by making those relationships more profound, longer lasting and more supportive of offspring. He introduces ideas of delayed parental altruism and the grandparent syndrome, and believes they support the existence of the new personality system he proposes . The Intriguing method he constructs, the TO8, arises from a simple but profound premiss. We are, the author reminds us, designed by evolution to be parents, so few of the current ideas about the mating strategies of men and women make sense. They are insufficient to explain why we love, why we stick with our mates and continue to assist our children even when they have reproduced themselves. The book includes as proof of the author's arguments brief descriptions of all the 64 important personality types, and it describes how to use the TO8 to understand your friends, lovers, rivals and allies in life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1871464 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

From the Author
"'This book will change your life'. We have heard that phrase uncountable times in blurbs and reviews? It's not wrong, though, to use it here. Essential Personalities could easily change your life. How? By showing you where and why your relationships will be nourishing and long lasting; by showing you where to find an escape from the repetitions of unworthy or unsupportive relationships.

If you want to know why you make the same mistakes again and again with friends or partners or bosses, this book will tell you why. If you want to start looking for a fulfilling partnerships, this book will tell you how to start. Read about your friends like you've never read about them before.

But be warned! This is not a self-help book, and it is not about laboratories. It is non-fiction: a cultural narrative of science and discovery that leads to inescapable conclusions about human evolution and why we love our partners and our children, and why our parents love our children; and it's about where our personalities may lead us next. Essential Personalities is more than just a narrative; it's a manual of self-protection and self-actualisation."

From the Back Cover
This book establishes a method for looking at the human
personality and presents a proof of the argument in the form of
sixty four personality types. There are three parts to the book.
The first part describes why I began the search for the human
personality and how the method, the TO8, came about. The
second part describes where my discoveries led, and in the third
part, the reader will find a complete list of the personality types
of the TO8 and a brief description of them. The method is a
brand new way of looking at the human personality and how
the monogamous mating that it implies has evolved, and with
it, the reader will not only learn about himself or herself from
the method, but also learn a new basis on which to judge one's
likely friends, lovers, rivals and allies in life.
"After all, it is our relationships that ultimately affect us more
strongly than mere economic circumstance. Our friends may
affect us more deeply than parents and siblings. Who we get to
know and how we relate to them can determine significantly
whether we remain in poverty or end up in a great job, whether
we stick in a ghetto or travel widely; whether we end up in
jail or as pillars of the community. They can determine our
rising above our surroundings and even the enjoyment of our
successes. What is true for us now has always been true for a
species that forms bonds to mate. Success and happiness in life
depend upon with whom you make your relationships, and the
progress of those relationships over time."
"This is all about love, isn't it?"
"Maybe."

About the Author
Andrew Kennedy is an independent researcher into the human mind. He was born and educated in England, graduating from Edinburgh University with a B.Sc. He is married with a daughter and shares his time between a farm in the Pyrenees and Andalusia. He has worked in a variety of occupations and has travelled widely. He holds a patent in a switching device, created the Taoism-inspired 3-D board game, The Game of Rat and Dragon and has published two books about Taoism, The Jade Suit, an epic poem about Chinese history, and Briefing Leaders, which contained new translations of two Chinese classics, I Ching, in which he analyses how the probabilities of the oracle affect its meanings, and Tao Tê Ching in which he incorporates the philosophy into a fictional account of Lao Tze's last days. He studied Traditional Chinese Medicine and graduated from the European School of Shiatsu as a practitioner. He maintains a shiatsu practice in Spain while he continues to consult on relationships problems. He writes regularly about science, complementary medicine and the human psyche.