Psychologists, along with other individuals well-read on human behavior, may be among the first to preach the importance of accepting people for who they are. This is horrifyingly ironic, and here's why:
First of all, breaking down people is, in a word, dehumanizing. A compassionate person would argue that humans should be subjects, not objects. I don't exist as a book for you to read; I exist as a human being who wants to be appreciated and cared for. We all judge people to a certain extent, for the sake of our own self-preservation, because we don't want to end up fraternizing with a person who's going to hurt us. But what of the judging that goes beyond that which we do to protect ourselves? Though we all will get to know someone more deeply as we spend more time with that person, there's something off-putting about making psychoanalysis in casual settings a priority.
It all comes down to a little thing called "agency." Maybe I don't need to be studied. Maybe I don't need to be broken down into a bunch of theoretical classifications so that you can look up a bunch of generalist approaches to dealing with people of my supposed "type." Maybe I'm more than just a focus for your analyses and social experiments. And why do we analyze and diagnose people? Why do we dissect people's behavior? Are we doing it because we are trying to understand them and accept them for who they are? Or are we doing it because we are looking for ways they can improve? Are we looking for reasons to love a person, or are we looking for facets of a person that they should fix?
Whether you're looking for the positive traits or looking for the negative traits, analyzing someone's personality will reveal both the assets and the setbacks of a human being. And even so, the criteria of what constitutes an asset or a setback is highly subjective; in fact, these "assets" and "setbacks" are merely your "likes" and "dislikes" (respectively). Many analytic people fail to realize that their evaluations of other people are largely based on their sets of personal preferences, rather than some bank of concrete psychological knowledge, which in itself is still comprised of highly debatable notions. In short, for the most part, your analysis of another human being is going to lead you to form a whole slew of opinions on what you like and dislike about someone. But is that other person really going to benefit if you hand them your printout of everything you've noticed about them? It is true that others can help us look inside ourselves and find ways to improve, but the presentation of a whole laundry list of character flaws is never productive. Deeply examining any person is going to reveal a pile of discrepancies between that person's character and what you would like him/her to be. Everyone has flaws, and the traits that you perceive as flaws might not even really be flaws-- they're just things you haven't gotten to like!
And what even is a flaw? A flaw is a quality of something that is less than ideal. And what, in reality, of all the people and things in the universe, is ideal? Does perfection exist? No! It doesn't! And your pursuit of perfection is even more ridiculous when you consider that this "perfection" only exists subjectively; your idea of a perfect human is different than anyone else's opinion of what a perfect person would be! That means that your judgments of the other person aren't even being made so that you can objectively find the best person out there. You are judging other people based on what your favorite person ought to be like. So not only is your in-depth analysis of people based on the pursuit of something that doesn't exist (perfection), but you are also doing it at the discretion of what you want! You're picking apart another person's psyche so that you can evaluate them against your subjective, flawed set of criteria-- what you want them to be. That's a little selfish, isn't it? And to put it bluntly, nobody cares what you want others to be. Other people are going to be the way they are, and you're going to have to deal with it. Instead of judging all of other people's failures to be the way you want them to be, perhaps work on learning to accommodate those who don't fit your ideal plan. It's the only way you can learn to deal, because your ideal human will only ever be just that: ideal. Don't let your idea of who someone could be distract you from who a person really is, complete will all of their perceived "flaws." In fact, abandon those ideal perceptions entirely. People are meant to be loved, and the only way you can do that is to face them and accept them for who they are, regardless of whatever starry-eyed perfectionist goals you may have.
What I mean to say is that we should give more thought to prioritizing our confirmed assessments of things over mere prospects and preemptive thoughts. Some people act like they know how something is going to turn out just based on something they've read, when indeed, they do not. I've had people tell me all manner of psychoanalysis they've run on me, trying to find a diagnosis for what is so unique about my mind and my psyche. Besides the failure to acknowledge the social "othering" that comes with trying to label me with a diagnosis, the attempt to explain my character with some clinical mumbo-jumbo has done nothing to affect my approach toward life. In fact, all it's done is influence me to consider myself a mentalcase, a broken human being. Those who live in the world of intuition and theory will, all too commonly, bring toxic needless complexity to issues that are, in actuality, practical and visceral.
For example, we have become a society that seems to label issues of gender, race, and sexual orientation as abstract, convoluted fields of study. While these issues are absolutely complex in their nature, they aren't complex because of their abstract, theoretical nature, like astrophysics. These issues are complex in that they are personal issues, and every person has a different narrative to contribute to this subject matter. An individual's stance on these issues, regardless of what it is, is based on personal emotions and simple recollections of human interactions. This isn't a field in extensive textbook study; rather, it's a field in which we learn from the sharing of our human experiences with the goal of intelligently and tactfully approaching dissimilar people and treating them properly-- and it's just as important as learning any subject we can treat as a textbook science. The distress I have with some people's approach to topics in humanities in this-- some people look at subjects like this as nothing more than an opportunity to learn theoretical concepts and apply them. For example, many self-appointed "intellectuals" will pick up terms like "gender identity" and "rape culture" just so they can incorporate them into their daily conversation. They go about memorizing facts about the history of the women's rights movement, and focusing their time on the theoretical postulates formulated by feminist theory for feminist theory, completely missing the most important objective. The primary goal isn't to stuff your brain with any theory whatsoever--the point is to learn the essence and importance of looking at other people with not only respect, but with agency. Everyone, regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other nebulous label, deserves not only to be looked at as equal, but as equally capable. And that, in itself, is a concept we can easily simplify-- just treat all others as perfectly respectable, perfectly capable human beings. And you don't need to learn that in a classroom! For the most part, people begin to understand that just by interacting with other human beings on a regular basis! And it isn't learned using the most complex inner machinations of the human mind; you learn it through the sheer impulse of compassion and hating to see others get hurt.
My goal here is to illustrate that understanding people isn't even a topic that involves complex, theoretical thought. Instead of making humanity about facts and ideas, let's make it about interpersonal interactions and relating to each other. Let's have conversations and listen to each other with ears of compassion, and let's leave the complex theory to math, physics, chemistry, biology, and medical sciences. Those are the studies of the world that require the deeply intricate thinking. I will admit that the medical sciences do include diagnostic psychology, but we should reserve that only for those disturbed individuals that really need it. As for understanding general people and learning how to socialize with them, these things are learned through practice; I'm talking about trial and error. Get to know me, and forge a friendship. If the friendship isn't working, isolate the problem between us and try to work together on it. Friendship is like learning to ride a bicycle-- the only way to gain any sort of ability is to try it firsthand. You don't learn to ride a bicycle by reading about it. You have to just try it. So stop trying to gain an understanding of me by reading about people like me. Try me.
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