Preface
Nowadays, people no longer understand one another. One need only observe their faces in the streets to gauge the state of a society with highly sophisticated communication tools, but where humanity has often been erased beneath the pixels.
What if spirituality and symbols could give people the keys simply to understanding one another?
Behind every great civilization in the world, great philosophies coexist, sharing a common thread: whether it is God, the Source or any other designation, an immaterial entity creates material elements.
The body can be singled out among these created elements. It is a material representation of the immaterial image of the soul. And if attention is focused on faces, similar attributes can point to recurring character traits.
Forty years ago, in his second year of medical school, Dr. Nicolas MIHU takes a keen interest in psychiatry. To acquire as much knowledge as possible, he approaches the director of his institution about undertaking a placement in this field. He is put in touch with a couple of doctors specializing in psychiatry. For a month, he attends university lectures addressing the following question: what happens when two strangers meet for the first time?
Conscious and unconscious mechanisms produce a picture, a complete image which, in the form of a first impression, will remain the feeling to be guided by.
What if a specialty, morphopsychology, could explain this image? This method of interpreting personality by observing facial features (the shape of the skull, forehead, eyes, jaw, etc.) was popularized in the twentieth century, notably by Louis Corman, who sought to link facial morphology with psychological tendencies.
It is not a new science and has inherited typological observations from antiquity. It postulates a profound and systematic correspondence between physical features and character. According to Dr. Nicolae MIHU, this discipline is founded on an essential spiritual truth: “the body is the permanent image of the soul.”
For more than 15 years, using photographs, Dr. Nicolae MIHU practices deciphering the many kinds of information revealed by the study of faces. Morphopsychology thus provides pragmatic explanations for the question of first impressions and initial feelings.
He has also practiced his portrait readings in a group setting on several occasions, with a sample of around thirty people in the same room. For example, using a photograph of a nose or a forehead, each person had to describe what characteristic this might represent in the subject. It emerged that the participants had offered interpretations that were true. The experiment therefore showed that anyone is capable of simply stating truths or personality traits consistent with the reality of the person photographed.
Might the ability to interpret faces not be an innate quality?
Dr. Nicolae MIHU has also treated more than 5000 couples in therapy over approximately 25 years, with a success rate of over 90% in relation to the goals set by the patients. His expertise and diagnoses have become more refined through analyzing male–female behavior. He draws the following characteristics from this: a woman perceives the world spontaneously and as a whole. This may stem from earlier times when she remained inside the dwelling and had to guess what her young children, who could not yet speak, wanted. She thus develops her instinct, while a man operates through a more logical and technical approach. By using her instinct, then, a woman grasps the essential information that a man can derive from a morphopsychological analysis of a face. However, as using one's instinct becomes less and less customary, the tool of reading facial features enables everyone to arrive at the same analyses.
By linking his experiences with readings and practices in Chinese, Indian and homeopathic medicine, Dr. Nicolae MIHU's idea is to guide people in perfecting their communication through a morphopsychological reading of their own faces and those of others, while also combining his knowledge of physics, philosophy and Chinese medicine to offer a simple diagnostic method.
It is in this spirit that the book presents concepts drawn from multiple fields, combined with the study of the image, in order to understand the psychology of those with whom we speak and thereby clarify communicative interactions.