Know Yourself Sanguine

Alexander Carberry’s earlier book Know Yourself is a masterful introduction to this now sadly vastly underrated therapeutic method. I defy anyone to read it to the end and fail to recognise from it which admixture of the temperamental types – sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic – best describe their own particular personality make-up. This subsequent volume, the first in a series of four, looks in far greater detail at just one of these, concentrating on the particular characteristics that go to form the sanguine personality, underscoring the strengths and failings that people of this nature display in their lives, and giving much practical advice to them about the ways in which those strengths may be enhanced and those failings mitigated. However, Alexander’s words also open the way to something much deeper, prefigured in his basic title, Know Yourself.

-- Sh. Abdalhaqq Bewley