RE: THE SYNTAX OF PERSONALITY

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At the age of 18, I married a man who had three children from his first marriage (their ages were ten, eight, and three). I lived with him for 19 years, raising these three children and giving birth to three of my own. I apologize to the readers for this jumble of numbers, but they seem rather necessary to the story.

My marriage turned out to be far from ideal (and that’s putting it mildly). Moreover, despite Nikitins’ assertions my relationship with the children was not always sunny and rosy – though I did my best. To my amazement, I often had an easier time dealing with my stepchildren than with my own flesh and blood.

At the age of forty, I had just as many problems as I had had in my youth. True, I did manage to find my vocation: the translation of documents became my profession, while my translations of poetry became successful enough to merit a Wikipedia page. However, my dealings with my sister and parents (and now with my children, too) remained as complicated as ever. My attempts to create a new family drove me to despair. Supposedly, all you need for a harmonious relationship is a mutual desire to be together. But it turned out that this is not enough…

Fortunately (unlike in the days of my childhood and youth) I now had a new blessing: the Internet, which created new opportunities for reading and interacting with people. And so, one day in January 2011, I read an article on LiveJournal that discussed the late Alexander Afanasiev, the creator of a new psychological typology. The article was titled «A Simple Russian Genius».

The author, a Moscow-based psychologist named Alexei Roshchin, wrote: «Take note: I’m saying this without any trace of mockery or condescension, and I don’t mean something like: ‘this is good enough for country bumpkins’. No, what we have here is a full-fledged genius on a global scale, who bears comparison with Freud or, if you will, with Mendeleev. Come to think of it, this man has indeed created a kind of ‘periodic table’ in the genre of psychological typology – a genre that seemed exhausted and used up… This typology is very deep, and – most importantly – it practically begs to be extended to various fields of applied social science, from psychotherapy to political studies…»

As might be expected, this article piqued my curiosity – as had socionics twenty years earlier. And, obviously, I was unwilling to accept the new typology on faith – yet equally unwilling to dismiss it without taking a closer look. Like socionics, it merited careful scrutiny.

So I sat down to read Afanasiev’s The Syntax of Love and found out that it answered all of my questions.

According to Afanasiev, each person’s character is determined by an inborn hierarchy of four elements: Body, Emotion (feeling), Logic (thinking), and Will (self-awareness). As should be apparent, these four elements can form 24 combinations: BLEW, EBWL, LWBE, etc. – i.e. 24 psychological types (in contrast to the astrologers’ claimed 12 types, Jung’s eight types, Augustinavičiūtė’s and Myers-Briggs’ sixteen types, etc.).

Afanasiev lists the attributes of all the variants (Will-1, Logic-3, Body-4, etc.) and describes the level of comfort/discomfort of their interactions. I began to test this theory on myself and my family, and, unlike socionics, it was a perfect match. All my intractable questions were solved one after the other; all my family woes fit neatly into Afanasiev’s pattern, like pieces in a puzzle.

Everything clicked into place. Contrary to popular perceptions (which I myself used to hold under the influence of Lena Nikitina), it turned out that the problems are not «rooted in childhood», in «our relationship with our parents», etc. All the issues stem not from childhood, but from the psychological type. The discomfort experienced in the relationship with our parents is not the cause, but the consequence of insufficient compatibility between the psychological type of the parent and that of the child.

Undoubtedly, a person’s psychological type is not the product of education or upbringing, but rather the outcome of a prenatal genetic predisposition, since it determines body constitution, reaction time, and other uncontrollable attributes.

For about a week, this was all I could think of. My job, kids, and all other affairs were proceeding alongside these thoughts. My brain worked at a feverish pace, like a wound-up mechanism, calculating the psychological types of all of my acquaintances, and I could almost hear it clicking and humming. (I had never experienced anything like this, either before or since.)

I saw why my marriage never had any chance of becoming harmonious and why, in spite of this, it had managed to last for 19 years. I found out why I had an easier time communicating with my stepdaughter than with my sister. I realized why I had difficulties relating to some people, while being able to establish a rapport with others effortlessly… I saw, for instance, why the relationship between Vladimir Vysotsky and Marina Vlady was doomed to constant conflicts, whereas the marriage of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev was harmonious… and so on and so forth.

Roshchin turned out to be right: Afanasiev’s scheme was indeed a work of genius – it was backed up with facts, and was simple, clear, and precise, like Mendeleev’s Periodic Table.

Actually, this hierarchy of self-awareness, body, feeling, and thinking is the same thing that Jung referred to as: «A comprehensive personality sketch, which exists in an inchoate form from the moment of birth». Augustinavičiūtė wrote along similar lines: «Different personality types, after experiencing identical situations, recall completely different things and tell about them in very different ways… There are oppositions that lead to a permanent state of conflict, or to the smothering of one member’s activities by the activities of the other. Conversely, there are complementary oppositions, which restore balance to a person’s psyche and energize his life…» These general descriptions are completely accurate; however, Afansiev succeeded where Jung, Augustinavičiūtė, and all his other predecessors had failed: he managed to determine the exact structure of a person’s psychological type and enumerate the functions of which it is made up.