Excess Baggage

January 4, 1993
Many people's strong points are vitiated by their innate weaknesses, according to psychologist Sills ( How to Stop Looking for Someone Perfect and Find Someone to Love ), and these weaknesses--or ``excess baggage''--are our blind spots. They are difficult for us to recognize; hence they make it harder for us to attain our goals and for others to like us. Sills offers deliberately exaggerated profiles of five main psychological types, each of which she sees as fueled by a different ``ruling passion'': control, self-esteem, security, attachment and justice. The person whose ruling passion is security may be very generous, but also dependent and manipulative, for example, and a person motivated by the need to control may be efficient, but could also be a workaholic. Accompanying each profile are exercises to help readers to jettison excess baggage. While Sills's analysis is simplistic, her prose is crisp and entertaining and her advice is practical. 50,000 first printing; author tour.