Read People Like a Book: How to Analyze, Understand, and Predict People’s Emotions, Thoughts, Intentions, and Behaviors

by Patrick King

You may be familiar with Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow. To put it very simply, the shadow contains all those aspects of our nature that we have disowned, ignored, or turned away from. These are the parts of our being we hide from others—and even from ourselves. Our pettiness, our fear, our rage, our vanity. The idea is that when we integrate our shadow, we cultivate a deeper feeling of wholeness and can live as authentic, complete human beings. You see, Jung didn’t care about “positivity” and self-improvement in the sense that’s popular today. He thought that psychological health and wellness came from acknowledging and accepting yourself—all of yourself—rather than in pushing the unwanted parts of yourself further and further away.

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The pleasure principle asserts that the human mind does everything it can to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. It doesn’t get simpler than that. In that simplicity, we find some of life’s most universal and predictable motivators.

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People work harder to avoid pain than to get pleasure. While everyone wants pleasure as much as they can get it, their motivation to avoid pain is actually far stronger. The instinct to survive a threatening situation is more immediate than eating your favorite candy bar, for instance. So when faced with the prospect of pain, the brain will work harder than it would to gain access to pleasure.

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Someone who’s underperforming at work might feel the need to protect their perceived skills and talent by deflecting responsibility to: “The boss has always had it in for me. And who trained me? Him! It’s all his fault one way or another.” Someone who trips and falls yet fancies themselves graceful will blame the fact that it rained six days ago, their shoes have no grip, and who put that rock there, anyway? Someone who fails to make the school basketball team will grumble that the coach hated them, they weren’t used to that particular style of play, and they didn’t really want to make the team, anyway. This is what it sounds like when the ego steps in to protect itself. There’s so much justification and deflecting going on that it’s difficult to know what is real and what is not. This all stems from the universal truth that nobody likes to be wrong or to fail. It’s embarrassing and confirms all of our worst anxieties about ourselves. Instead of accepting being wrong as a teachable moment or lesson, our first instinct is to run from our shame and cower in the corner. This is the same reason we will persist in an argument to the death, even if we know we are one hundred percent wrong. If the ego had a physical manifestation, it would be sizable, sensitive, and heavily armored (to the point of going on the offensive)—essentially a giant porcupine. When the ego senses danger, it

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consider the facts. Instead, it seeks to alleviate discomfort in the quickest way possible. And that means you lie to yourself so you can keep the ego safe and sound.

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where the appeal of denial lies. You are actually changing your reality, where

Finally, we come to sublimation. In the same way that projection and displacement take the negative emotions and place them elsewhere, sublimation takes that emotion and channels it through a different, more acceptable outlet. A single man might find the loneliness at home unbearable and channels that unmet need into doing charity work four nights a week. A woman may receive some bad news, but rather than get upset, she goes home and proceeds to do a massive spring clean of her home. A person might routinely turn panic and anxiety into a dedication to prayer, and so on.

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