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The subject might come under different headings like psychological evaluating a person etc. but I think you know what I mean. Being able to get a psychological picture of a persons personality and tendancies.
Not sure why you would bother. Is it a book or research paper your going to complete?
Formal profiling is an infant science and will stay that way. If you are seeking to ID someone from the population, there are too many variables for which to account. All those profiles on mass murderers or rapists? There are people who have lived their lives and not engaged in toxic activity. Were this the case, there would be more of their ilk. Just on sexual assault alone, 1 of 3 women will be victimized in their lifetime. Were it truly the case you can 'find the person' given their background, we would be overrun by deviants, tracking a 33% 'hit' rate offending against the rest of the population.
I suggest you let this one go. It will not go well to examine this topic.
I would like to see a dictionary of all the knowledge available to read people. It's fun to guess what kind of personality someone has and what their behaviors mean.
Of course, I mean knowledge based on scientific studies. I read Joe Navarro's "What Everbody is saying." Valuable, but this book is for detecting deception.
If you have some time on your hands and are interested in the various Myers-Briggs Personality Types, check out the Typology Forum. It's loaded with tests, reference books and people who are fun and helpful.
The subject might come under different headings like psychological evaluating a person etc. but I think you know what I mean. Being able to get a psychological picture of a persons personality and tendancies.
Not as easy as you might think. First, a "psychological picture" is going to be different depending on which school of psychology/psychiatry you are dealing with. For example, the DSM will give you the current "medical model" which is different from classical Freudian classifications, which is different from a Jungian model, etc. There are places where these classification schemes intersect, but in places they are also very different. Also, bear in mind that even within a single school of thought, there are changes over time -- DSM IV is different from DSM II, etc.
More importantly, its not realistic to think that you are going to get an accurate, detailed picture of someone's personality just from a reading a book or two and having a few words with the person. Therapists train for years to do this, and diagnosis can be difficult in practice. About all you can hope to do is to pigeonhole people in very broad categories, such as hysterical, obsessive compulsive, narcissistic, etc. and even that will be misleading, since no one is exclusively one thing or another; our psyches contain elements of many different pathologies.
It can be interesting and educational to read up on the different types of neuroses, personality disorders, etc. But be careful you don't turn into a lay psychiatrist and start classifying people based on a little knowledge, and if you choose to do so, pls don't try to tell people with emotional issues "what they are." That is guaranteed to do nothing for anybody.
The trait that I've noticed the most with people is that to never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
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