Insightful guide to type and archetype, offering an accessible approach to personality identification and personal growth.
An in-depth and practical exploration of personality typology, anchored to the timeless wisdom of archetypes explored by Jung and popularized by Joseph Campbell, Thomas Moore and many others.
Giannini navigates admirably within the often murky waters of personality typology, with an innovative approach offering that which is so often rare in psychology texts: accessibility. With experience across a wide array of fields–-Jungian analysis, engineering, business administration, even the Dominican Order–-the author is well-equipped to discuss typology and personal growth, and his background in Jungian psychology certainly comes to bear. Carl Jung created the broad outlines of the concept of personality typology based on in-depth analysis and observation of others; however, he never systematically explored typology in great detail. The typology thread was picked up by the mother-daughter team Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers, who developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The test uses questions designed to illuminate the configuration of an individual personality dynamic. The MBTI lists 16 combinations of couplings, based on the four functions: sensation [S], thinking [T], feeling [F] and intuition [N]. The attitudes and perceiving elements are assigned according to the pattern of responses to a given situation and added to the couplings. Giannini builds a strong case for the integration of the two arms of Jungian psychology, archetypes and types, and he argues commendably that the couplings have an archetypal basis and only by aligning oneself with one's true psychological typology can genuine individuation or wholeness be achieved. Despite scattered uses of unnecessary jargon, the journey is stimulating and helpful, an exciting and skillful exploration into psychological type.
Insightful guide to type and archetype, offering an accessible approach to personality identification and personal growth.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 093565270-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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