NATURE'S THUMBPRINT
The New Genetics of Personality

Peter B. Neubauer and Alexander Neubauer

Columbia University Press, 1996

Genes determine our eye color, blood type, and tendency toward certain diseases. That much is clear. For most of this century, we have considered parents and the general environment to be the primary sculptors of personality and psychological traits - who we are and what we can become. In this book, Peter B. Neubauer, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York University, and his son, Alexander Neubauer, right the balance in the nature-nurture debate.

They show how our genes affect the way we react to the world, interact with it, and behave in many situations. Based on fifty years of clinical practice and on studies of identical twins, Nature's Thumbprint explores the range of inborn inclinations upon which personality is later built: individual timetables of maturation; adaptation to the family and the environment; reasons why some children are more vulnerable to environmental obstacles than others; and why some parents are stymied by children who do not match their expectations, while others respond in positive ways. Sure to redefine thinking in psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy, Nature's Thumbprint will also give parents a new understanding of their children. It offers a hopeful message to us all, for only when we understand the biological as well as the psychological underpinnings of personality can we come to a genuine understanding of ourselves and our lives.