COFFEE WITH A MASTER PALMIST

Yesterday I was lucky enough to share a couple of hours with Richard Unger, who is a) one of the smartest people I’ve ever met—and  I tend to hang with very, very smart people—and b) more fun than a barrel of monkeys. 

Richard is responsible for teaching me the skill that has given me the independence to further my dilettantism, though I admit it has also threatened my commitment to dabbling because it is so completely fascinating.  He is not just a hand analyst, he is THE hand analyst.  A former investment counselor, he taught himself palmistry as a young man.

 A short discourse on palmistry is necessary here!  Palmistry is distinct from fortunetelling.  Fortunetellers sometimes use palmistry as a tool for divination, just like they use crystals, tarot cards, goat entrails, and God knows what else. I offer no opinions on the validity of what they do; like every profession, there is, I assume, a mixed bag of practitioners out there.

But palmistry is actually a somatic method of character and personality assessment.  When I was a psychotherapist, assessment was my greatest love.  I learned as many systems of assessment as I could find. I played with the DSM workbook the way other people do crossword puzzles.  Richard’s system of hand analysis is the best assessment system I have ever seen. One of the greatest things about it is that it works for everybody. And it is the only system I’ve seen that doesn’t overtly or covertly (yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, Enneagram) pathologize people, but instead gives them a useful, positive perspective from which to accept themselves and keep on growing.

Possessed of a sharp, curious, analytic mind, Richard saw many shortcomings in the various schools of traditional palmistry, so he then went on to create his own system!  One of the unique things about Richard’s brand of hand analysis is that it rests on the secrets of identity encoded in our fingerprints. 

As usual, he was brimming with projects: a San Francisco high school wants him to do hand analysis with interested students; he’s getting ready to teach a year-long master class in Bellingham, Washington; he will fly to Switzerland for ongoing work with the clients of several psychiatrists in Zurich.  And always, always, he’s looking for ways to bring his work to the attention of larger numbers of mainstream psychologists and psychiatrists here in the United States.

One of his persistent dreams is to argue with every single faculty psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School.  Richard LOVES to argue.  He argues intelligently, enthusiastically—even joyously.  Because his mind is so lively and agile, he makes his points clearly and often humorously, but the remarkable thing is that he’s so quick to grasp your counter-argument that he can instantaneously analyze it, break it down into components he can agree and disagree with, and thus move the argument into new, original research on the spot.  Arguing with Richard is like Mr. Toad’s wild ride—terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.

Richard always serves up a heady brew of new possibilities.  I came away from our coffee date with my head swirling with them. Perhaps I will do some tutoring for him, maybe teach one of his students some of the marketing tools I’ve learned for our unusual profession; I might work with him on the high school project.  And then there’s that film documentary that is being made about us: UNTAPPED, Secrets of the Hand, which has been on the verge of completion for so long—I hear it’s alllllmost finished…Red Carpet, here we come! 

And as always, I drove away from our meeting feeling immense gratitude to Richard Unger for his intelligence, his humor, his skill, and his immense generosity in teaching me to do what I do.