Modern hand analysis is based on the millennia old tradition of Chirology, which dates back to ancient India. Richard Unger, the founder of the International Institute of Hand Analysis (IIHA), gathered this knowledge from numerous sources in the 1970’s and tested his process on tens of thousands of people to develop a system of reliable interpretation. In 1979, medical findings on the formation of fingerprints led him to a revolutionary fingerprint interpretation scheme (LifePrints), which made the possibilities of hand analysis more precise.

Your fingerprints form a unique pattern of your individuality. Fingertips contain the highest density of nerve endings in the body and their patterns give us a glimpse into the proportions of your hands as a fetus in the womb. Through this work, we can deduce the psychic predispositions you were born with: the areas in which you flourish and the developmental issues you need to master on your journey through life. The fingerprints are, therefore, like the DNA of your psyche. Together with the changing lines and proportions of the hand, these fine grooves form a map of your being and your life pattern. 

Contrary to the cliché of palmistry, hand analysis in the IIHA tradition does not make any predictions about the future, but rather illustrates what kind of life fulfills you and what difficulties you must face head on for your soul’s growth. These are based on identifications of personality traits that have been verified and confirmed through thousands of hand analyses. We describe these traits based on archetypal qualities and their relationship to each other. We use the archetypes of the four elements as well as Greek and Roman mythology, supplemented with metaphors from our time.

The three-layer model of hand analysis allows us to differentiate and relate different levels of personality. Thus, the proportions of the hand describe the basic features of the character as well as its expression in different areas of your life. Shrinking areas, finger curvatures and skin texture indicate the effects of your lifestyle or previous adaptations to external circumstances. Such clues are also found in the fine secondary lines in the palm of the hand, which together with the three main lines describe the flow of energy in the different areas – similar to the paths in a landscape, which become more and more prominent the more they are walked. Finally, the fingerprints give clues to your unique psychological dispositions that must be appropriately dealt with over the course of your life. Hand analysis thus looks at both predisposed and experienced influences on our nature, making it suitable for contextualizing findings from psychological typologies such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) or from astrology.