What is the TO8?

The TO8 is an entirely original way of at the world, at the process of change, and at our personalities. It is a completely fresh look at people and the personalities they express, and provides successful analyses of all relationship problems.

It was devised in the 1980s by poet and independent researcher, Andrew Kennedy. He collected his thoughts on the mating relationship and wrote an introduction in 1995.  He made a web site 1999 to gather more evidence from people interested in solving their relationship problems. 

He produced a new book Essential Personalities, and why humans found love, adapted to monogamy and became better parents, publishd in 2009, to explain the theories and to present the personality types he believes are distinguishable.

Kennedy says, 'Evolution has programmed us to be similar to one another in ways that arise and change within one's lifetime according to patterns revealed in the solar year. Modern life, and especially urban life, however, has disturbed our ability to read the human personality types - including our own.  Consumerist society confuses our understanding of individuals because of the totemic function of objects. Material concerns easily inhibits us from recognising our best partners.'

The TO8 is the result of Kennedy's analysis of the human personality, its changes and its interactions with others.  It throws new light on how we think and behave.

The significance of the TO8 is beginning to have an  influence on traditional astrologers as well as writers on the Enneagramma, who have taken on board the ideas of themes within themes. The TO8 neatly solves problems that astrologers still wrestle with such as the question of the southern hemisphere and the role of the Sun in describing a personality.

So What is Different?

The TO8 shows how our personalities are formed in a process of continuous movement towards a resolution

It is based on a notion of how we evolved.

Its starting point is what we share as humans.

In particular, the TO8 uses its unique formulation of the Landscape, the cognitive and cultural space that is fundamental to human life, to re-cast the individual identity.

How is a person defined in the TO8?

A person is born with Major and Minor personality influences. The Major describes the core being - our consistency as individuals, while the Minor describes our everyday 'face'. We write the two together separated by a colon with the Major, or dominant, sign first, like this, 4:5 or 6:1.

Each of these two signs also has a Resolution (drives), an Affinity (friendships) and an Antagony (blocks).

Adding to these basic dispositions an individual has an on-going personal development cycle starting from birth called the Essential Year

Through the TO8 we can understand how we gradually develop and come to understand who we are, our achievements and feelings of well-being. It can describe, with increasing levels of complexity, how a person will interact with the world, and the influences that a person is most sensitive to.

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Children of the Sun

Thanks to the stability offered by the presence of the moon early on in the life of the Earth, the seasons have provided a set of constraints to the evolution of life.

In particular, human evolution, coming up against the seasonal extremes in climate found a way to jump the limitation of the slowness of changes and adaptions in the genes.

We are all children of the Sun, and our behaviours are a consequence of it.

Read a review of Essential Personalities here