Nature and Human Personality

Review

Reviewed by Julian Winston

What? Another book? How come I didn't know it was coming?
Oh... it's not really a NEW book....
In her latest work, Catherine R. Coulter has done an impossible task and has abridged her "portraits" of 12 of the most common remedies she has written about in her other three books. These condensations retain the essential flavor of her prevoious works including her magnificent narrative style, and the use of literary and historic figures to bring the remedies to life.

Although the crticism can again be raised that we really don't KNOW if Mozart would have been helped by Calcarea or if Sherlock Holmes needed Arsenicum (how can you give a remedy to a fictional character?), Coulter explains in the introduction that "Historic and lirterary figures portray human characteristics in concentrated (or archtypical) form; and because they have become familiar parts of our cultural heritage, any allusion to them suggests to the reader a host of associations that bring the remedy's specific personality into clear focus."

The chapter read as smoothly as her original works. Lycopodium is but 15 pages in this book, compared to 45 pages of a slightly more condensed type face in her larger work. Having heard Coluter present these remedy portraits as lectures before the books were writren, I can only marvel that she was able to abridge them as well as she has.

The remedies covered in this work are: Phosphorus, Calcarea, Lyycopodium, Sepia, Sulphur, Pulsatilla, Arsenicum, Lachesis, Silica, Nux vomica, Natrum muriaticum, and Thuja.
Each chapter also opens with a beautiful small illustration of the remedy source. "Who could have understood these so well as to do such appropriate illustrations," I wondered. Checking the front of the book gave me the answer: Alex Coulter, her son, was the artist.

While the text of the books has been so well condensed from the larger works, an addition is offered in the form of a synopsis that follows each chapter. These synopses cover the following: Principal Regions Affected (Head, Chest, Digestion, etc.) Generalities, Modalities, and Guiding Mental Symptoms. Although the information in these synopses can be found elsewhere, the pulling of it together in one place makes them chock full of information and well worth the price of the book.

On the down side, without further guidance and training, some might consider these portraits enough to prescribe upon. Although the author's knowlege of materia medica shines through in her other works, the abrigement has removed many of the references from Hahnemann's provings, and a student might see these as the whole milk rather than the cream.

The book could be very useful as a guide, but the information within should not be taken as whole cloth-- a well taken case, referenced to materia medica study is of primary importance, and the information in this book is but a piece of the larger puzzle-- but perhaps the piece, in some cases, that may complete it. The book provides good information (with the above caveat) and gives a flavor of Catherine Coulter's further writing. If you are not sure you should get her three volumes, read this one-- it is a good taste of it.

This book review is reprinted from the British Homoeopathic Journal Vol 87, July 1998, with permission from Peter Fisher, Editor.

Nature and Human Personality: Homeopathic Archetypes

Unlike Coulter's three volume Portraits of Homeopathic Medicines, her latest book is a slim softback that can be read in a day. This is one of its strengths. It contains the same remedy pictures as her larger work, but condensed into a more easily absorbable form. Thus Coulter has reduced the 60 pages on the mentals of Nux vomica in her 'Portraits' to 18 pages in the shorter book. Although this necessarily omits interesting details that abound in her original work, and makes the reading of Nature and Human Personality a little less enjoyable for one who has already read the original, it does make for more clarity. More than one homeopath has commented that Coulter's original portraits were so long and detailed that one couldn't see the wood for the trees. Here they are just long enough to give a detailed summary of the personality, without being exhaustive. All the principal mental characteristics of each type are discussed, in a light and relaxed style that makes the reading effortless, and peppered with anecdotes from Coulter's own practice which break up the prose well.

Thus the reader will encounter the fastidiousness of Nux vomica, followed by his touchiness, his impatience, and his road-rage. Coulter then goes beyond the stereotypes and describes the other pole of Nux vomica-the calm, masterful, well-spoken Renaissance man who is sympathetic and constantly desires to improve himself. He has learned to control his temper, and is sensitive enough to marvel at the beauty of a roadside flower. It is this breadth of accurate knowledge of the mentals of constitutional types which makes both of Coulter's works so valuable. So often homeopathic students are taught over-simplications of the personality profiles of remedies, and are subsequently quite unable to identify the real thing. By studying the more subtle profiles of modem writers like Coulter and Zaren they can move away from stereotypes, and Coulter's new book is a good starting point.

This book is aimed at two audiences. Firstly it is aimed at the homeopathic student, who does not have the time or the money to read the three volumes of 'Portraits'. It would also be useful to those practicing homeopaths who do not have an in depth appreciation of the personality profiles of the of the polycrests. The second audience is the lay reader with an interest in homeopathy. Coulter caters to both groups by including at the end of each chapter a table which summarises the physicals, generals and mentals of the type.

When I first picked up Nature and Human Personality I was excited to find Coulter had written a new book. I ploughed through a couple of remedies feeling somewhat disappointed, since the material seemed so familiar, and then I read the introduction, which reveals that this book is a condensation of her earlier works. However, when I read the chapter on Thuja my interest was renewed, since the essence of Thuja is so difficult to capture in words, and Coulter succeeds here very well. It is probably the best treatise on Thuja mentals I have ever read, covering in detail the struggle that many Thuja's have in choosing whether to live on this Earth or in some ethereal realm they have access to: 'Because he has been so profoundly injured in this lifetime ... a part of Thuja's spirit has withdrawn from this world and unconsciously sought refuge in some other sphere of reality,' 'a certain psychic break- a nonintegration between the spirit and mortal frame-has already taken place.' This 'psychic break' is exactly the pathology that I find most of my Thuja patients struggle to cope with, and it is rare to see it so clearly described.

Being a Gemini Mercurius, I do naturally have some quibbles with Coulter's descriptions, but they are minor. In her description of Thuja which I liked so much she suggests that the Thuja individual is at that point in her evolution where she must come to terms with psychic reality, and that the latter frightens her. I would put it the other way round, that many Thuja people are quite at home in the psychic world, and must struggle to learn to be grounded and of this Earth I also found myself disagreeing with Coulter when she identified the constitutions of famous people, but no two teachers of the mentals would ever agree on such things! (I would be very surprised if Leonardo Da Vinci was a Thuja as Coulter suggests, but I have no argument with her descriptions of Thuja itself).

In summary, Nature and Human Personality is a condensation of Catherine Coulter's earlier 'Portraits of Homeopathic Medicines' which covers the mentals of 12 polychrests. It would probably be of little interest to those who have already read the larger work, but is an ideal text for the homeopathic student, the lay reader, and those homeopaths whose knowledge of personality profiles is limited. Its style is easy to read and similar to that of my own Homeopathic Psychology which covers about 40 remedies in similar depth. The other comparable work is Ananda Zaren's Core Elements of Materia Medica of the Mind which covers the mentals of about five remedies per hardback volume. As its title suggests, Zaren's work is written in a more formal didactic style which reads far more like a text book than the other works mentioned. That being said, Zaren's descriptions of the psychodynamics of the remedies are at least as detailed as Coulter's, and possibly somewhat deeper in their analysis of the psychopatholgy of each type.

P. Bailey
British Homeopathic Journal
Volume 90, Number 1, January 2001