Unger - LifePrints: deciphering your life purpose from your fingerprints

Copyright 2007 by Richard Unger

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

www.tenspeed.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Unger, Richard.

LifePrints : deciphering your life purpose from your fingerprints / Richard Unger.

p. cm.

Summary: A guide to discovering ones life purpose by decoding the map revealed in our unique combination of fingerprints, based on twenty-five years of research and fingerprint statistics for more than fifty thousand handsProvided by publisher.

Includes index.

1. Fingerprints. 2. Self-actualization (Psychology). I. Title.

BF935.F55U54 2007

133.6dc22

2007016834

ISBN9781580911856

Ebook ISBN9780399582967

v5.3.2

a

To Alana

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE
LIFE PURPOSE, LIFE LESSONS, AND SOUL PSYCHOLOGY DEFINED

CHAPTER TWO
IDENTIFY YOUR FINGERPRINTS AND FIND YOUR SCHOOL

CHAPTER THREE
DECIPHER YOUR LIFE PURPOSE AND LIFE LESSON

CHAPTER FOUR
DEEPEN YOUR UNDERSTANDING

CHAPTER FIVE
CREATE YOUR LIFE-FULFILLMENT FORMULA AND LIVE A LIFE ON PURPOSE

Famous Fingerprints:

FOREWORD

Not quite ten years ago, while I was working on the manuscript for a book considering the evolutionary connections between the human hand and brain, a friend urged me to meet Richard Unger, a person who looks at peoples hands and says things about them. Palmistry was nowhere on the list of research topics for my book, but since I was very much interested in people whose working lives are strongly dependent on the hand, curiosity overcame my professional misgivings; I contacted Mr. Unger and we arranged to meet. A soft-spoken, thoughtful man brimming with Brooklyn wit and enthusiasm, Richard answered a number of questions about his background and work; then, during a moment of quiet when I was trying to account for the somewhat unexpected feeling that I was talking to a highly intelligent man with interesting things to say, he asked me, Would you mind if I look at your hands?

Of course you know his reading of my hands unmasked me in a trice, but as I subsequently learned, any hand reader worth his salt can do that in his sleep. What mattered more, and what explains why I eagerly accepted his invitation to write this foreword, was that he also agreed to an informal, private test of his interpretive system by reading the hands of a few of my close friends. I was surprised when he said they would not have to meet with him personally; he would only need to see their handprints and fingerprints. He showed me how to prepare an ink print of the hand and its individual fingerprints and told me to bring these to him for a reading as soon as I had collected them.

I returned with the prints about a week later, full of anticipation but totally unprepared for what happened. It was as if I had delivered a medical school quiz on chest X-rays to the chief of the radiology department. Richard didnt tell me who was happily married or who owned a yellow T-bird; instead, he told me what each person was instinctively good at and for each person how a chronic nemesis in his or her life might behave. When he was done, I told him briefly about each individual, still slightly disoriented by how accurately in each instance he had described something essential and distinctive. After my rendering of the life story of one of the five, he looked puzzled, shook his head, and said, I really missed that one. But I had withheld a piece of extremely personal information about this particular person, and the truth was that Richard had hit five home runs.

At this point I decided that I could not simply dismiss this demonstration; the readings certainly could have been a fluke, or a clever charade, but the tables had turned and the burden of explaining his trick was now mine. I would have to take my time and learn more about what this man was doing. I studied his system.

Ten years have passed since our first meeting, and Richard and I are now not only close friends but professional colleagues. What I have learned from him during the decade of professional interactions we have enjoyed since our first meeting has both refreshed and intrigued my sense of the hand as both an emblem and an instrument of the human spirit. What he has taught me has also had important consequences for my thinking about a whole class of perplexing disorders regularly encountered in both neurological and psychiatric practice and ultimately convinced me that there was at least a limited role for hand reading in my own practice. As you might guess, I was not merely dubious about offering hand readings to patients in a neurological clinic; there was good reason to expect criticism, or worse, from colleagues. But after the first timid trials, I realized the method was an easy fit with my own style of history taking and in fact could be a powerful catalyst for the airing of personal issues; understandably, patients tend to be cautious with a doctor they do not already know and trust. Yes, a few people balked at having their hands read, but as I gained experience the readings were increasingly welcomed by patients who, once they recovered from their surprise, expressed gratitude that a doctor would actually take the time to tell them what their hands said about them.

At the center of Richards work is the astonishing assertion that every human hand bears a unique pattern of fingerprints that can be decoded in a psychologically specific and meaningful way. I have been a reluctant, incomplete, and at times extremely difficult, convert to this claim, but I now largely accept it as fundamentally valid. We have had a number of discussions about designing a scientific proof of his method, but since the world is still waiting for any such demonstrations for a host of interpretive systems widely used in clinical psychology and psychiatry, I am content for now with the empirical evidence. Based on a decade of observation, I consider Richard Unger to have produced an objective and straightforward analytical tool with a breathtaking capacity to unmask the sources (and the potent, insistent dynamics) of many of the common frustrations and failures all of us experience in our daily lives.

The single overarching theme common to modern psychology, classical mythology, fairy tales, great novels, and moviesand it is a theme that everyone understandsis some version of the narrative concerning what we like and do not like about ourselves. What Richard has found in fingerprints is not simply a fresh way of referencing this inevitable inner dichotomywhat we commonly think of as our strengths and weaknessesbut a compelling argument for treating them as complementary, inseparable, and in fact equally essential agents for healthy psychological development.

As a physician, the most impressive benefit I find in Richards readings is the implicit invitation to discern in our most intimate and intractable frustrations (and, for some, in unexplained physical disabilities) not bad luck but a unique and intimate code of personal meaning. Learning to read that code can yield entirely unexpected self-understanding and a clear vision of what any particular person, irrespective of life history, can do to move toward a life of real and progressive fulfillment.