Cat fanciers relish all types of cats because each has their special charms as pets, and virtues as living creatures deserving worship. They don't claim that, say, big cats are better than small cats or that colorful cats are better than gray cats. Yet these are just the sort of pointless judgmental categories that psychologists often resort to in their desparate need to appear knowledgable to laymen.

Psychiatrists are the worst. They start their characterology by dividing human beings into exactly two types: normal and abnormal. Since they have nothing whatsoever to teach normal people, they don't go any further in splitting this group into subcategories. But they go after the abnormals with meat clevers, switchblades and box cutters, chopping them up into finer and finer nuggets, and giving each a latinized name to make their distinctions look like end products of scientific research. Yet these distinctions are often borrowed from entirely different realms of knowledge unrelated to the study of "mental health", let alone human nature.

The Fourth Edition of Hinsie and Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary, for example, defines levophobia as the fear of left and dextrophobia as the fear of right. This makes about as much sense as making a categorical distinction between the pimple on your left cheek and the one on your right. It does make sense, however, to sell a different medication for each malady. It makes a lot of sense to Big Pharma. Marketing such superficial distinctions allows shrinks and their backers to make fortunes while getting away with psychological murder.

Unless you're an "uncooperative patient" — in which case your insurance company will be hit with a whopping bill anyway — a well-trained psychiatrist will know exactly how to diagnose and cure any and all of the following mental illnesses that are currently plaguing our nation:

In the gay world of the 1970's, our new leaders told us we were "as good as straight people." This was okayish, but led directly to vanity and self-indulgence in which we'd been hiding for decades. At the Center, to foster a deeper sort of self-development based on a fresh respect for honesty and courage, we encouraged people to look at the gay community with a critical eye. If most of us chose to take out our frustrations in political protest, our center could at least train the troops in understanding the bigger issues at play. We didn't want our goal trivialized or our future jeopardized. We would be the "psychological arm" of the movement, it's central intelligence agency.

Most people, unfortunately, see social criticism as the "right to whine". And so we used to hear a lot of carping about what's wrong with what Paul called "the Christopher Street scene". "We're too flighty," they'd whimper. "If only we could have long-term relationships!"

The idea that knowing what's wrong doesn't tell you what's right never occured to them. Time after time, their recommendations calmly drifted into the still waters of "settling for what everyone else gets" — a state Paul started referring to as a "lifestyle depression". Usually their moral admonitions degenerating into prohibitions. To this day, every year at gay pride events old guys whose only distinctive charasteric is to have stayed together for half a century are trotted out, as if moribund stability were a consummation devoutly to be wished by the rest of us.

Whenever someone at the Center came up with a superficial homily that trivialized some aspect of human nature, Paul would whisper to me, "That guy really hit the bullseye with a sponge!" I too learned not to suffer fools gladly. For most of my life I have tried to stay clear of these shallow numbskulls, and especially the self-promoters who monetize folly by churning out books that reduce human nature to silly factoids, give these a brand name, and then market the hell out of them. To me they are the Sophists of the 21st century. I don't like them, and I think they ultimately retard scientific progress.

But recently my friend Ann has shown me a higher path. Just because I teach post-grad HumNat doesn't mean I have to denigrate pre-school HumNat. In fact, doing so fails to respect the growth process that young people have to go through to get to where I was accidentally lucky enough to get earlier in life than they. So I no longer try to think of Sophists as mortal enemies, but instead as allies. Ignorant people can be quite child-like and charming, after all. And they're rarely important enough to rank as enemies. Their teachings are baby steps towards a path of however much enlightenment their students can handle at the moment.

Examples of these occasionally useful training wheels include , and elaborations of the Jung schematic like the and the . I always remember to give credit to Jung for taking polarity seriously long before Paul even if, as Paul said, "He fucked it up" with his damned subtypes and subsubtypes. Tellingly, few of his students do more than copy-cat his Not Exactly Helpful Elaboration Binges (NEHEB). The problem here is that anyone can observe facts, write them up and notice that lots of people enjoy agreeing with them. But it takes a little effort, please, to churn factoids into insights which get to the heart of the matter and reduce all the chatter to simple useful ideas that can actually help.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

Isabel Myers (1897-1980) and her mother, Katharine Cook Briggs (1875-1968) developers of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® instrument, shared a vision. They wanted to enable individuals to grow through an understanding and appreciation of individual differences in healthy personalities and to enhance harmony and productivity in diverse groups
Katharine and Isabel encountered Jung's ideas in 1923. They decided his ideas were so powerful that they could help people make better life choices and use individual differences in constructive ways. Thus they began two decades of "type watching."

After several years of adding her own observations to those of Jung, Isabel Myers, a graduate of Swarthmore College, began creating a paper-and-pencil questionnaire to assess type. The MBTI® instrument was developed over the next three decades as research was collected from thousands of people. Research on the MBTI instrument has continued into the present, with dozens of articles published each year.

and deserve credit for promoting Jung's idea of gender-free polarity, but they were not exactly deep thinkers. Rather than to seek insights into the dynamics of the growth process, they prefered a "curio cabinet" approach to their subject, cataloging subtypes and subtypes of subtypes rather than understanding dynamic growth processes. These categories look great on an infographic, but whether they exist in the real world didn't seem to concern them much.

Neither Paul nor I had ever heard of these two during his lifetime, but if he had I'm sure their superficiality would have appalled him. Personally, I always find the rush to monetize scientific discoveries suspect. Rather than a scientific tool that continued to evolve and serve the larger interests of mankind, their "instrument" will probably be seen by future generations as just another historical curiosity — like the pop-sci books that appeared a hundred years ago about Professor Einstein's amazing discovery of a "fourth dimension" or the more recent Pulitzer-Prize-winning idiocies that explain that the teachings of the Talmud have been verified by quantum mechanics.

The Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS)

In 1978, and Marilyn Bates published , in which they unleashed the . These days you can visit and check out all the cool psychoswag for sale at discount prices. The Bank of America, Allstate, the U.S. Air Force, IBM, 7-Eleven, Safeco, AT&T, and Coca-Cola have already done so.

SEARCH FOR YOUR STYLE

Begin by completing the questionnaire on page five. Then read a picture of your way (p. 167-206). You may even enjoy talking with spouse and offspring and friend of your DIFFERENCES.

The authors are trainers of therapists and diagnoticians of dysfunction behavior at California State University (Fullerton Campus). Impatient with the maturity theories of Freud, Maslow, Erickson, Sheehey, Levinson, and others, they insist that not everybody goes through the same phases of growth to maturity. "You may have an identity crisis or two, but I won't, haven't, and can't. And it's not because I'm fixated, arrested, or hung up at some immature stage, passage, or season of my life. I hear different drummers."

Professor Keirsey is a long time clinical psychologist of the gestalt-field-systems school. After 30 years of treating hundreds of teaching, parenting, marriage, and management problems, Dr. Keirsey now challenges the reader to "ABANDON THE PYGMALION PROJECT," that endless and fruitless attempt to change the Other into a carbon copy of Oneself. "It's OK," he says, "to marry your opposite and beget children who are far from being chips off the old block, but it is not OK to take marriage and parentage as license to SCULPT spouse and child usng yourself as a pattern to copy. PUT DOWN YOUR CHISEL. LET BE. APPRECIATE."

SPOILER ALERT: If the , if the — indeed if any Commercialized, Cosmetically Groomed And Over-Sold System (CCGAOSS) has helped you in any way — stop reading now! I don't want to take anything away from your happiness with that experience. It's perfectly legitimate, and I will love and respect you till the end of time because hell, at least you're trying!!!

THE BAD NEWS: These systems won't, and can't, do much for you if you aspire to be anything more than "normal". Like Catholic "indulgences", and embarrassments like , these systems will fit you into a nice cubby-hole where you'll feel safe for awhile. But eventually the big issues will return with a renewed vengeance and you will be faced with Countless Nagging Questions (CNQ) that psychological cough drops do nothing for. I'm not a psychopath, Anderson. I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research!

The modern "normalization cure" is good in that it thwarts the tendency of shrinks to pathologize everything. It's motto is, "You're normal so you don't need no stinkin' cure!" But it's bad in that it pretends that all of us are merely different models of the same make. You may be a Ford Anglia and I may be a Ford Prefect, but hey we're all Fords, right?

Actually, we're not even all just Fords, and the next step in human liberation has raised its adorable head in recent years in the "neurodiversity" movement. We're now talking respectfully about people who used to be denigrated as "idiot-savants" or, at best, "eccentrics". Now we like these "high-functioning autistics", and may even invite them to lunch.

We're not all Fords, then, and with each decade it becomes clearer that we may not even all be automobiles.

Furthermore, these typologies aren't scientific since they only delineate observation categories, like Linneaus — who never posited any laws which might explain how each biological taxon maintined its differences from the others. No laws, no science. No cigar. This is why Linneaen taxonomy has been overthrown by cladistics.

The fact is, none of these sponges even use the concept of type correctly. There are differences between us, yes, but their assignment of type is quite arbitrary. New York is very different from Los Angeles, yes, but is New York a different type of city? No. This is why there is no "science of cities": nobody can even begin to figure out where types or species or taxa of cities — if they existed at all — might begin and end. What good would asking your patient which symptoms she had if you couldn't turn them into an accurate diagnosis that led to useful treatment options? Sponge baths know about symptoms, but can't diagnose you and somehow never offer treatment options.

The bigger problem with all this, however, is that human beings have histories. Their bodies change over a lifetime and combat different problems. And their personalities change too, facing quite different circumstances and growth issues as they develop, or fail to. So, even if you and I started out as "alpha males", for instance, at the age of 50 our growth issues may have nothing whatsoever in common.

Personally, rather than getting stuck in the quicksand of 21st-century ignorance, I think it might be healthier for you to give up searching for an appropriate "role model" to squeeze yourself into, and just go with the idea that you're a Unique Sentient Being (USB), sent to spy on Earthlings from a planet on the other side of the galaxy, whose future will defy history and amaze humanity.

RECOMMENDATION: Enjoy your evaporating transitory illumination while it lasts. No matter what you do, Your life is going to be a bumpy ride. It's not going to be easy, no, but at least it will be better than your ancestors', even if a lot of this will be due to technology, only a little to our burgeoning insights into human nature, and hardly anything to pseudoscience.

CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT: I think I should let John Mortimer's Horace Rumpole have the last word here, from my favorite Rumpole story, "The Anti-Social Behavior of Horace Rumpole". Earlier he was condemned by the legal system for his excessive "carbon footprint", but here he is defending a child who played football in a posh neighborhood and is being prosecuted for "anti-social behavior":

"I shall be brief. What is anti-social behaviour? If you ask me, I would say that the world has advanced towards civilization by reason of anti-social behaviour. The suffragettes behaved anti-socially and achieved the vote. Nelson Mandela's anti-social campaign brought justice to South Africa. Now this young person, this child I represent "

I turned to wave a hand towards the long-haired twelve-year-old with curiously thoughtful brown eyes. "This young Peter, or Pete, Timson."

"Who is neither a suffragette nor Nelson Mandela," Madam Chair thought it fit to remind me.

"That is true," I had to admit. "But he is an innocent child. He has no criminal record. He has broken no law. If football is illegal, it should be forbidden by an act of Parliament. Don't stain his blameless record by a verdict based on untested hearsay evidence."

"Is that all, Mr. Rumpole?" Madam Chair broke into my final dramatic pause.

"All," I said. "And more than enough, in my submission, to let this child go back to playing." With this I sat down, in the vain hope that I might have touched, somewhere in Madam Chair, a mother's heart.

When his own trial comes up, he offers this defense:

"We live in an unhappy period when the government wants to use its legislative powers to tell us how to lead our lives. It wants to tell us what to eat and drink, what to smoke and how we cross the road. Children are not allowed to grow fat and if they do they are snatched from their families and put into a home. If you smoke cigarettes, you won't be treated by the doctor.

"There are plans afoot to turn us into a nation of vegans who drink carrot juice and go on hiking tours to the Lake District. This case is an object lesson in this form of tyranny. It's geared to send a man to prison for eating a slice of pie.

"In the great days of our history, magistrates such as you, sir, stood up against a tyrannical king who tried to enforce taxes not approved by Parliament.

"Today you're being asked to enforce laws against activities which have never been made crimes by our Parliament.

"You have your chance today, sir, to reject these illegal and inappropriate proceedings. You can stand up for justice. You have a chance today, sir, to become the Pym or Hampden of the City Magistrates' Court. You may be criticized by the thinking bureaucrats of Westminster, but you'll be acclaimed by all those who cherish our ancient freedoms, our constitution and the proper rule of law." Even Paul got caught up in Theories Gone Wild (TGW) in his first monograph, — but at least he admitted it. Think Copernicus. With Ptolemaic astronomy, scholars homes were filled to the rafters with recorded observersations of the positions of celestial objects, because they didn't know how to predict them. Copernicus proved that these objects moved in elipses and that the surface area under any arc of the ellipse was the same for any time period. Once the insights of Copernicus were accepted, scholars could throw these reams of observations into large, colorful bonfires, and throw open their homes to wild parties once more. The taxonomical phase of science complicates; the insightful phase simplifies. See and Thomas Harris' . . Lots of people turn away from the MBTI once they see how superficial it is. A good example is by . In evidence, I offer to this court the , which is unfailingly effective as an emetic. See .