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Nature's Thumbprint: The New Genetics of Personality

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Genes determine our eye color, blood type, and tendency toward certain diseases. That much is clear. But when it comes to our psychological traits-who we are and what we can become-few people would credit genes with a major role in human development. For most of this century, we have considered parents and the general environment to be the primary sculptors of personality, and have bestowed on them all the credit for our triumphs and the blame for our failures.

Now, in a book that will change forever the way we think about ourselves and our children, Peter B. Neubauer, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York University, and his son Alexander Neubauer, right the balance in the nature-nurture debate. They show how our genes affect the way we react to the world, interact with it, and behave in many situations. The authors delineate the genetic roots of our personalities, even as they remain faithful to Freudian psychology.

Based on Peter Neubauer's fifty years of clinical practice as a psychoanalyst and researcher, and on studies of identical twins, Nature's Thumbprint explores the range of inborn inclinations upon which personality is later built: individual timetables of maturation; adaptation to the family and the environment; reasons why some children are more vulnerable to environmental obstacles than others; and why some parents are stymied by children who do not match their expectations, while others respond in positive ways. Sure to redefine thinking in psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy, Nature's Thumbprint will also give parents a new understanding of their children. It offers a hopeful message to us all, for only when we understand the biological as well as the psychological underpinnings of personality can we come to a genuine understanding of ourselves and our lives.