Beyond Personality
What it's not
Lenore Thomson doesn't offer a bunch of categories to say that some people are inherently this way and other people are inherently that way. She offers no taxonomy of different kinds of talents, nor different kinds of callings, nor different kinds of environments that people need in order to flourish, nor Gifts Differing of any sort. She uses the terms "Extraverted" and "Introverted" to mean something mostly unrelated to whether you're gregarious or reserved. As Lenore uses the four-letter codes, they aren't even a taxonomy of personality types.
What it is
What Lenore offers is a way to see your current way of understanding your personality as a way in which you've limited yourself in order to serve various needs, especially your need to plug in to the social matrix in some way. She offers a way to see your current understanding of your personality as an illusion. More importantly, she offers a vocabulary of different attitudes that lead beyond it, to a fuller realization of your genuine self in your real life and circumstances.
The vocabulary doesn't point you to some distant place where you're supposedly heading. It aims to help you direct your attention in a way that is fruitful now, given your current situation and your current self-knowledge. The vocabulary focuses on what has shaped your personality so far and the attitudes that have grown into your characteristic ways of understanding and navigating your situation.
Clash of expectations
This makes Lenore's ideas unhearable in terms of most approaches to understanding personality. What most people are looking for when they get a book on personality, especially one with a name like Personality Type: An Owner's Manual, is something to say, with authority, "This is the kind of person you are. Anyone who tells you to be different is wrong. Official Science has shown that there are these kinds of people and those kinds of people, and you are this kind of person." What Lenore offers is exactly not that.
But Lenore isn't telling you to be different than the way you are, either. She offers some ideas for how to truly be yourself, without the limitations of any particular theory of personality.
See also: Not Personality, Investments vs. Essence, Dobie Gillis show.
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