by David Keirsy and Marilyn Bates

The authors are trainers of therapists and diagnosticians of dysfunctional 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 was 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 is not OK to take marriage and parentage as license to sculpt spouse and child using yourself as a pattern to copy. Put down your chisel. Let be. Appreciate."