born in Eindhoven, Netherlands - 1966

Theo Maassen may be described as a stand-up comedian, as a satirist, as an anarchist, as one for whom absolutely nothing is holy and for whom humor can be misery, with laughter rising from anguish and despair. His popularity is centered, in the main, in the Netherlands. Audiences flock to his one-man shows and let his volatile "madness" overtake them. There is a strange, almost dangerous, chemistry when Theo Maassen gives vent to his fury and rage (at whatever serves as his targets of the moment - and this might include members of his audience) and, in this way, delivers his audience to peaks of laughter... though not always a laughter which is comfortable.

he features which describe this hand of Theo Maassen bring us to about the closest a man can verge upon madness without obliging hospitalization in a psychiatric hospital. If the criterion for such hospitalization is an inability to differentiate between the real and unreal and between fact and fantasy, then the morphological and dermatoglyphic constructions we find here bring us perilously close to meeting that criterion. The same may be said for constructions which point to an uncertain alignment between the faculties of cognition and emotional responsiveness. Which is to say that this person may not always react emotionally in a manner appropriate to the circumstances. In the photograph of Theo Maassen's hand (made available to us by Mr. Frank van Cappelle of Amsterdam) we may point to 4 areas of interest in this regard.

A. Here we direct our attention to the index finger in general and to the thinning, waistlike formation of the base phalange of this finger in particular. This finger gives representation to the Persona - that part of the psyche which presents this person to other people. It explains how this person shows himself, or herself, to other people and how he, or she, has become integrated into the community of people. When this finger is seen as bent and as misshapen as seen here we would understand that this would manifest as a stressful, tense, and altogether uncertain identity with other people. Communication would be strained and never really fluid or comfortable.

The waistlike development of the base phalange tells us that, as a child, Theo Maassen had never known a proper relationship with his father. He had never known what value his life had for his father. Resolving this uncertain and undefined image of himself as reflected in another's eyes would prove a central preoccupation of Mr. Maassen throughout his adult life. He would strive, obsessively, to get a picture of how he is perceived in the eyes of others. Much of what his audience would explain as theatrical license when he delivers his caustic and furious rhetoric, is, in effect, his need to move his audience to reaction so that he might see an image of himself reflected in their eyes.

B. The very thin and "boney" little finger points to a history of physical molestation. It would seem that Theo Maassen suffered severely at the hands of the dominant image, or images, in his life. There was no maternal affection whatsoever and no experience of belonging. This construction is what normally describes a person who, as an infant, was abandoned by his mother and who spent some time in an orphanage, or with foster parents (who may have provided for all his necessities save those that were so critical emotionally).

C. Here we find a dermatoglyphic construction which largely defines how Theo Maassen absorbes information, processes that information, and invests that information with emotional significance. We would be looking at what handreaders like to call the Line of Head and which medical people refer to as the Lower Transverse Line. It begins (where it should) at the very edge of the palm roughly halfway between the index finger and the thumb. The line, however, carries in a sharp and lengthy projectory to the very edge of the opposite side of the palm (the percussion side). This is not seen too frequently. The distal half of the palm (the side of the ring and little fingers) is the dominion of the subconscious mind. Thus the closer the line verges to the edge of the palm here the deeper into the reaches of the subconscious would the information which this line carries be delivered. Not only would the information be deposited in these darkest regions of the subconscious mind, but the very length of the line underlines the gross overprocessing, as it were, of this information on its way to this station. By overprocessing the information which may have originated with things seen or heard, Theo Maassen so expands its meaning as to distort its contents and true context. Then the peculiar chemistries of these deep subconscious areas of the mind will give rise to emotional responses that few would be able to understand or link in any way to the information originally absorbed.

D. The Thenar line (popularly referred to as the Line of Life) is the line which circumvents the ball of the thumb. This line offers a picture of the relative discipline of the ego system. What largely determines this discipline is the ability of the person to distinguish between what reality actually offers, and the reality which the emotions engineer in the mind of the person. Where we find a section of this line broken, or weakly imprinted (as we find here), we would visualize the person projecting onto his, or her, true reality a "reality" fabricated by emotional and entirely subjective constructs. In this way a person can see what they may very much wish to see and not always what the true reality would oblige them to see.

There are, of course, numerous other features which contribute to the overall design of Theo Maassen's personality. He is an inherently creative person with marvelous intuitive faculties (the lines in the general area of "C" which rise diagonally to the conscious areas of the mind), and he would be extremely open, gregarious, spontanious and at times even infantile (largely from the way the hand is held). It would be very much in place to say that everything about Theo Maassen would appear larger than life, and that just being who he is would seem to be pure theater.

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