Our Ways: Values and Character

This book develops a remarkable axiological characterology of healthy personality types, distortions, and styles of sexual attachment. It synthesizes the author's profound understanding of human nature, recent psychological interpretations of the ancient Enneagram, and insights into connections between values and psychology drawn from Robert S. Hartman's formal theory of value. It shows how personalities are differentiated by the ways they manifest Hartman's three dimensions of value: intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic. It shows how these correlate with nine personality types identified by Enneagram interpreters. Human personalities differ with respect to the ways in which intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic values are developed (or not developed) and ordered (as dominant or subordinate) within individuals by nature and/or nurture. The book shows how personality distortions are grounded in perversions of value orientation. It shows how a value-based approach to character disorders can be linked to moral vices and to many familiar diagnostic and therapeutic psychological categories like obsession, hysteria, schizophrenia, neurosis, and various addictions. It explains the many ways in which value orientations are expressed in sexual attitudes and relations, and how value-based character traits that dominate the non-sexual areas of our lives are carried over into the sexual areas.