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“Knowledge may give weight, but accomplishments give luster, and many more people see than weigh.” (Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, Letters, 8th May 1750.)

As we enter the 21st Century, our educational institutions are very different from those of 100 years ago. Indeed, education itself is very different. Gone are the days when academics, surrounded by an elite group of like-minded individuals, sequestered themselves in the pursuit of knowledge. Universities and colleges were visibly different from schools, and teaching had yet to displace mentoring in our institutions of higher learning. To-day, our universities are populated by faculty, not academics, who establish laboratories of graduate student research assistants, and attend conferences where they develop their social network in the generation and publication of their “research” – a coterie of colleagues, supporting each other in the pursuit of grant money. In a world where bigger is better, quantity has replaced quality. It is therefore refreshing to come across a text such as The Gender Beyond Sex.
In presenting his conceptualization of the human mind, Robbie Pos reveals a thoroughness and breadth of scholarship that, despite a life-time spent in the clinical practice of psychiatry, identifies him as a true academic. Not for him is the mindless empiricism of contemporary research. Over the course of his clinical practice, he has collected a substantial body of data, which he uses to demonstrate the origin and generality of his model of the mind. However, the strength of this book lies elsewhere. Relying on logic to ground his speculative hypotheses in the findings of others, he has not only woven one of the most comprehensive theories since Sigmund Freud gave us psychoanalysis, he has presented it in a single volume.
Almost every aspect of the human condition is covered by Pos. How we think, how we feel, how we interact, are all considered within the same conceptual framework. But he does not stop there. He presents the implications of this conceptualization for marital counselling, vocational guidance, adolescence, and education; and caps it off with a chapter on the evolution of the modern mind. In so doing, he draws together the work of Freud, Jung, Piaget, and Jaynes, and links it to the work of art historians, geneticists, and archeologists. The result is a book that not only provides something for everyone, it is a book that is guaranteed to provide insights and a blurring of the boundaries that have traditionally been placed around our areas of study.
The information explosion of recent decades has lead to distinctions being made between data, information, and knowledge. In The Gender Beyond Sex, Robbie Pos takes us one step further as he delves into understanding.

Donald Lidstone, B.A., LL.B.

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The “Eureka” phenomenon dates back to the time of Archimedes, and has been experienced by scientists, mathematicians and philosophers ever since. It has also been experienced by those lay persons to whom the discoverers have imparted the new-found wisdom or truth, as when I read Stephen Hawkings’ A Brief History of Time while riding a train from Geneva to Zurich. This was nearly a century after Albert Einstein not too far from that train track developed his theory of relativity, and used the “walking on the train” scenario to illuminate his thesis.
We cannot always have such personal relationships with revelations of the truth, especially paradigm shifting ones. In the case of The Gender Beyond Sex, however, I am blessed with the honour of having discovered the truth about time gender duality while carrying out the seemingly dry task of copy editing 360 typewritten pages of an esoteric dissertation. Very early in the process I seized the truth of the oeuvre and chapter by chapter recognized the wisdom and reality of the analysis. For me, it was like being asked at the age of nine to edit a draft of the famous book A Doctor Talks to Nine to Twelve Year Olds About Sex (except that sex was a hitherto known quantity whilst the gender beyond sex, the time gender, was discovered and explicated by Dr. Robbie Pos for the first time).
As my day job is that of a lawyer, the book explained and clarified for me, the behaviour of other lawyers, clients and witnesses. I had some intuitive feel for the alpha-beta dichotomy, but never realized it until I read the book. Now I can often predict behaviour, and in some cases plan strategy and adopt tactics to suit.
As a writer, I have found the time gender explication helps me flesh out characters that have up to seven dimensions, with dialogue, conduct and thoughts that are true for betas or alphas, as applicable.
The book will be controversial and open up many avenues of further exploration. The scholarly research, statistical underpinnings and lucid analysis will form a foundation for a panoply of ancillary research projects by future scientists and other scholars.

David J. B. Aris, M.Sc.

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I have known Robbie Pos since 1940 when we both entered high school (Barlaeus Gymnasium). Over the last number of years we alternated between the Netherlands and Canada as a place to meet and review the progress of his The Gender Beyond Sex and of my Hersen Spinsels: Bouwstenen voor de Psychologie (Brainwaves Building Blocks for Psychology).
Pos identifies two types of people, one time-oriented, the other situation-oriented. This human duality turns out of pivotal importance, for it profoundly affects all of one’s significant interpersonal relationships. As is the case with so many brilliant ideas, those of Pos are amazingly clear and easy to grasp which, given their importance, makes it almost inconceivable that this duality among people was not recognized before.
My short remarks on The Gender Beyond Sex are influenced by almost 40 years of experience as an industrial manager, often having to deal with whom to appoint to a particular position, or how to render staff functioning more efficient and solve involved problems in cooperation. Had I been knowledgeable of Pos’ book early in my career, I would have dealt quite differently with many of these managerial challenges. Knowing that two people may think, experience, and be motivated in fundamentally different ways (possibly complimentary, but often confrontational) introduces a completely different view, for example, on the suitability of a person for a position. One could render staff functioning more efficient by being aware of the human duality Pos discovered, and deal more effectively with the resistance against change among the work force, resulting in a significant improvement in cooperation.
A layperson can easily understand Pos’ book which has a solid underpinning. This greatly enhances the acceptance of his ideas and facilitates putting them into practice. I have no hesitation to strongly recommend The Gender Beyond Sex to anyone who is interested in enlightening and improving many of her or his interpersonal relations, not in the least to those whose professional decision-making involves comprehending the ones about whom these decisions are made. This certainly includes managers who are responsible in their enterprise for appointing persons to significant positions, and for improving labour efficiency. They will find a wealth of support in Pos’ book.

Janette Patricia Pelletier, Ph.D.

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I am grateful for the opportunity to read this masterful work of Dr. Robbie Pos: The Gender Beyond Sex. I react to this book from a number of personal perspectives -- developmental psychologist, mother, spouse and perhaps more saliently, alpha. The interaction among a reader’s recognitions of personal time, gender, and each of her/his other life roles create a powerful intrapersonal meaning that strikes an immediately recognizable chord.
The ‘gender beyond sex’ is time gender. Just as humans are either female or male, so are they either alpha or beta. Alphas and betas experience time, and thus development, in different ways. I ask how it is that the human duality in the experience of time could have gone unnoticed or at least, remained unwritten in developmental psychology, a discipline based on time. Dr. Pos’ keen insight, derived from years of clinical practice in psychiatry, has evolved into a compelling and coherent theory of human development and interaction. Dr. Pos proposes that we are born alphas or betas, the natural consequence of alpha-beta parentage, not subject to change as a result of environment, although environmental factors create uniqueness within the time gender profile. Time gender does not emerge in a behavioral sense until the developmental period of early childhood as a young child’s perception of him/herself as a “body” begins to integrate with an emerging mentalistic understanding of the world. From this point on, it seems that developmental change shows increasing coordination and differentiation of mind/body activity. Furthermore, the time gender theory holds that this coordination looks different in alpha and beta children; beta children experience it along a delineated past/future timeline whereas alpha children experience it within the here and now. These two temporal perspectives set the course for the rest of development, including sociability, self-esteem, education and more. The theory is tightly crafted and probes issues deeply (betas will appreciate this); furthermore, Dr. Pos provides empirical evidence (that alphas like so much) to support the features of an alpha/beta developmental profile. Beyond the developmental trajectory of alpha/beta predisposition, Dr. Pos brings the time gender to life in historical alpha and beta figures whose life work likewise centered on explanatory mechanisms of development, specifically, Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. The lives of politicians such as Winston Churchill and Lyndon Johnson and other unnamed individuals are highlighted as exemplars of alpha and beta phenotypes within a number of occupations.
A reader of The Gender Beyond Sex, taking the perspective of family member, will see the accuracy of the time gender theory in explaining the development of each ‘self’, the interaction among the players in the family, the pathways to successes and failures in marital, parent-child, and child-child interactions. The implications of this work for parenting practice, for marital counseling and child/adolescent guidance are evident; the ways in which alpha or beta parents respond to alpha or beta children, depending on the combination, may serve to exacerbate or rescue an undesirable situation.
Chapter 12, an oeuvre unto itself, relates in detail the evolution of time gender, essentially unifying the ontogenetic view of alpha/beta development with a phylogenetic evolutionary perspective. The parallels between human evolution and individual human development emerge as the story tells of the emergence of artifacts, tool use, representational art forms and thinking.
Readers will see themselves and others in this book. Its applications extend across educational and occupational disciplines as a teaching tool, reference book and handbook of practice.