Discover Your Real Assets

INTRODUCTION

Here you are! I have never seen you, probably never heard of you. Yet within this book you will find a description of yourself. Not, perhaps, as you are at this moment, but you as you can be, as you want to be. To help you find out just what that Self of yours is and what it can do is the object of this book.

Let me say at the outset that you will find nothing negative about yourself, for there is nothing negative in the Self your Creator gave you. We shall help you find your real assets.

There’s no mystery about it, no soothsaying. It is ac­cording to a scientific principle. You know that a rose is a rose, but there are Crimson Glory roses, Ophelia roses, Rosa Rugosa, Floribunda, and many more. A dog is a dog, but there are collies and spaniels and Scotties and Bedlingtons and dachsunds, to name a few. And you’d never mistake one for the other.

You know that every race of man has its distinctive characteristics, some more easily discerned than others.

Well, there are also types of human personalities that you will find to be distinctive psychologically when you learn what their differences are. Because the human is a more complex organism than other forms of life the variations are more subtle. But these can be defined, and as you learn what they are you will not only find that you know how your own particular type of mind works but you will also be able to see what makes other people tick.

Of course every person is unique. No one just like you has ever been or ever will be. But in your quality of mind and emotion you fall into a specific grouping. This quality is inborn. It never changes. It can be developed, as it should be, or it can be inhibited. This is the result of the impact of the environment.

Various psychologists, notably Carl Jung and Ernst Kretschmer, have made type classifications. David Sea-bury, the pioneer consulting psychologist, has embodied some of their ideas in his type classification, particularly Kretschmer’s concept of cycloid and schizoid. But Seabury has gone into the type differentiations much more fully; hence his classification is very much more specific.

Seabury had many thousands of clients when he was practicing in New York. In his work with them he found that there were certain basic characteristics which each one possessed, according to his emotional drive. The latter fell into four large groupings, based on the four instinctual drives of attraction, curiosity, pugnacity and flight. In man, these instincts are sublimated.

Attraction or sex, the instinct of creation and nurture, produces the physical infant; in its sublimated form, it produces the brain child, the book, the work of art, the invention, the new in any field.

The drive of curiosity becomes wonder, the urge to know why, what, how and when, but particularly why. People of this type are especially interested in the mean­ing of what happens, rather than the simple fact.

The pugnacity instinct becomes rage, the constructive urge, the drive to change things. It finds its outlet in building, in various branches of engineering, and so forth.

The instinct of flight takes the form of caution, fore­sight. It looks ahead, it conserves, it senses values. It takes care of things and people.

So Seabury calls the four basic emotional drives Sex, Wonder, Rage and Fear. Everyone has all four of them, but one is accented in each individual.

Seabury also found that everyone has a secondary drive which modifies the first. For example, in every Sex type person, the creative drive is modified by wonder, rage or fear. Therefore he calls them respectively Sex-wonder, Sex-rage and Sex-fear.

In the Sex-wonder type, the wonder deepens the cre­ativity, tending to send it into more philosophic areas.

In Sex-rage, the rage, the urge to do, drives the creativ­ity on to fulfillment.

In Sex-fear, the caution tends to retard the creativity, to keep it from believing that it is creative.

Thus each primary drive is modified by one of the other three, giving us Wonder-sex, Wonder-rage, Wonder-fear;

Rage-sex, Rage-wonder, Rage-fear;

Fear-sex, Fear-wonder, Fear-rage.

These are all described at length in succeeding chapters.

No one drive is more important than any other. Each has its particular work to do in the world, work for which it is especially designed. When functioning prop­erly, each one cooperates with the others. The creative, sex drive gets the idea out of the blue; the wonder drive interprets it, forms the blueprint; the rage drive builds according to the blueprint, the fear drive raises the neces­sary cash, insures the creation, and in general takes over and sells the finished product.

You have one of these drives accented, and you will rec­ognize your basic type in the description of it. There are tests, too, which will help you to pinpoint your type. When you know it, you will know where to put your efforts. You will know, too, why you have not been sat­isfied with your life up to now. You will know why you have felt instant rapport with some people and not with others.

In Dr. Seabury’s work and in my own, I have seen over and over again the exhilarating effect of applying this knowledge of the types to individual cases. A man will enter the consulting room looking despondent and un-happy, his face a mask of gloom. He isn’t satisfied with his work or with his life. Nothing gives him happiness.

First I find out what his type is. When I know that, I can give him a picture of what his native capacities are, the kind of life to which he is best suited.

He has undoubtedly thought himself a failure. And he has been, because he’s been trying to do something for which he wasn’t fitted. He didn’t know himself.

As I describe the man he really is, his face lights up. He grows excited about the possibilities opening up be­fore him. Hope springs within him, and he leaves the office with head up, firm step, and a smile. The new pic­ture he has of himself is stimulating and inspiring.

You, too, can have this experience. The reward which the knowledge of the types offers is a new view of your­self, and I can promise you that you will like what you see.