RE: THE SYNTAX OF PERSONALITY

Afanasiev: a trivial story with a non-trivial result

The structure of the world is very simple. We just cannot grasp the exact nature of this structure. A chaotic jumble of mysterious systems and incomprehensible theories; we have a hard time wrapping our minds around this. And then, suddenly, as in the case of Maxwell, once the formula has been written down, everything becomes simple and explicable; everything can be expressed through four equations, and nothing else is needed.

Natalia Berloff

In the second half of the 20th century, there lived a man in Moscow whose name was Alexander Yurievich Afanasiev (he was born in 1950). In many respects, he was a rather ordinary man. He had a family – a wife and two kids; he worked for a living and was interested in literature, music, karate, world history, and other curious subjects.

However, in some respects he was not so ordinary after all: he had no interest in career advancement or social status. For this reason, he took on odd jobs – a props man in a theater, a security guard, an editor in the journal of the Orthodox Patriarchy, a matzo cook at a synagogue – all in order to feed his family and give himself the opportunity to pursue those activities that truly interested him. He painted, composed music, wrote books; the fact that he read a lot should go without saying. He was a thin, unflappable, and thoughtful man.

Once, he experienced a life crisis. Well, actually, the story itself is rather trivial: he had a complicated relationship with his wife. At a certain point, he left her for a new girlfriend, but this affair, too, quickly reached a dead end. He was depressed, and tried to make sense of his situation – why does it have to be like this?

He was told about socionics, the new psychological theory that purported to explain – and even predict! – the relationships between people of different types. He was initially interested, but quickly became convinced that socionics was of no help to him, that it would not give him the answer, even though that answer surely lurked somewhere nearby.

He kept on thinking – and found the answer.

He laid out his discovery in a book entitled The Syntax of Love: a Typology of Personality and a Prognosis of Relationships in Couples (1991).

Yet another biography – mine

When looked at in the right way, facts that seemed to be completely contradictory, disjointed, and illogical suddenly acquire a logical explanation… Events fit snugly, accurately, and seamlessly into the general theory, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, provided that this theory is correct.

Alexander Y. Vasiliev

I was born in 1970, in the town of Reutov near Moscow. I was the fifth dweller of a one-room apartment, which also housed my father, mother, grandmother, and grandfather Mark (Meir), who had become paralyzed after a stroke. My grandfather passed away when I was 2 years and 3 months old, yet I have a fairly clear recollection of him. In 1974, my sister Miriam was born. She was named after our grandfather, as is the custom among Jews.

Only in 1984 were we allowed to move into a more spacious apartment, and only in 1987 were we permitted to leave the USSR for Israel – a move that both of my parents had dreamed of, even before they met.

* * *
When I was six, my mother enrolled me in a musical school, to learn to play the violin. I didn’t like the violin, and had to suffer in vain. But when, in solfeggio class, we studied a song about a wolf, I rewrote it, using different words while keeping the same theme and tune – essentially translating it from Russian into Russian. I still recall the amazed reaction of my teacher, Marina Genrikhovna, when I showed her my “translation”. Is it possible that my scribblings have miraculously survived, and are still in her possession? I’d like to take a look at them…

Three years later, Miriam began to attend the same school, whereupon she quickly mastered the art of playing the violin. The stunned listeners would tell our mother: «Oh, how she vibrates!». This is something I’ve never managed to learn.

However, I did manage to learn to read at the age of 3.5, and soon began to devour all the adult books that I could lay my hands on. At five, I would bring smiles to the faces of the adults by quoting from Faust and The Life of Aesop. By contrast, Miriam, who had also learned to read at the age of three, would always run out of steam after a word or two.

When I was ten, We and Our Children by Boris and Lena Nikitin became one of my favorite books. I envied the lives that their children led, and believed every word written by the Nikitins – after all, their claims were not idle flights of fancy, but the products of extensive parental experience and detailed observations. And they claimed the following:

«All these factors put their stamp on the future character of the children growing up in the family. Can we foresee every eventuality? No. Can we be responsible for everything? In my opinion, we have to! I often marvel at the ease with which mothers complain to each other: ‘my boy is so unaffectionate’, or ‘my girl is so weepy’, or ‘mine is growing up so stubborn, I wonder who he got this trait from’, etc. – and never the slightest attempt to search for the root cause in their own parenting behavior! Supposedly, their children were just born like that… And yet, I cannot recall a single instance in which some particular flaw in our children did not stem from thoughtless, incorrect, and irresponsible actions by the adults – especially by their relatives and loved ones, and most of all by us, their parents».

These words by Lena Nikitina always filled me with optimism: ergo, my own children would be wonderful – affectionate, docile, and not prone to weeping; after all, I would always act thoughtfully, correctly, and responsibly! Their childhood would be utterly unlike my own!

My childhood, and that of my sister, was not all sunshine and rainbows. We both grew up in considerable psychological discomfort, to put it mildly.

* * *
I was always interested in three subjects: languages, poetry, and psychology. I studied English at a special school in Moscow; I learned a smattering of Yiddish from my grandmother. As for Hebrew, I began to learn it at the age of ten – first from my father, and then in home-based study circles (which were illegal and dangerous at that time). At school, I would sometimes try my hand at translating ballads by Lord Byron, and sometimes – at Jewish songs. Poetry was always within easy reach, whereas psychology was fraught with difficulties. From early childhood, I had been troubled by questions: why are people so different? How can one learn to deal with unpleasant or aggressive individuals? Why am I – and others – occasionally driven to behave rather irrationally?

As has been said above, I did manage to receive a partial answer from L.Nikitina: people are different because they were influenced differently by their parents in early childhood. And yet, my puzzlement refused to go away. I wanted to study psychology at the university, but suspected that even there I would not find all the answers. At any rate, they were not to be found in books, either – as I learned after reading works by Pavlov, Vygotsky, Kretschmer, and Vladimir Levy. It turned out that Levy’s books, while explaining little, did help me to live, in some unfathomable way. I gave up on the rest of official psychology, and began to study linguistics and classical philology at the Hebrew University.

When I was twenty, I read in the papers about socionics, a new science of human characters that had been developed by Aušra Augustinavičiūtė on the basis of Carl Jung’s theories. I was excited at the prospect of finally having my questions answered, and bought a book on socionics.

The book was devoured in a few hours, yet it left me perplexed. I spotted contradictions in the description of the characters, while seeing no contradiction whatsoever between the «dichotomies» that were supposed to be diametrically opposed to one another. The tests were virtually impossible to answer. Questions such as: «Planning or improvisation – which do you prefer?» or «What is more important to you – logic or personal relationships?» sounded to me like: «What is more important – the hands or the feet?» I asked my father to answer the test questions, and saw him similarly perplexed. The proposed options clearly did not fit either of us. On the next day, I brought the book back to the store and sold it back at half-price, regretting the wasted time.