Personality Types - Carl Jung

2: Carl Jung

In 1921, Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung published his book Psychological Types. In this book, Jung proposed, based on the evidence of his years of working closely with hundreds of psychiatric patients, that people come in eight different psychological "flavors", depending on which of four mental "functions" they preferred using the most, and on whether they were "introverted" (preferring the inner, subjective world of thoughts, ideas, and emotions) or "extraverted" (preferring the outer, objective world of things, people, and actions).

Jung's four functions include two "perceptive" functions and two "judgmental" functions.

The perceptive functions are ways of perceiving, or taking in information. The two ways people do this are called "sensing" and "intuition". Sensing means using data (either real-time or remembered) from our five senses as our main source of information. Intuition means paying more attention to our inner voice and its ability to recognize patterns, than to our sensory impressions.

The judgmental functions are ways of judging, or making decisions based on the data we take into our conscious minds from our perceptive functions. Jung called our two ways of judging "thinking" and "feeling". By thinking, Jung meant making decisions based on deductive logic. By feeling, he meant making decisions based on emotions.

Of course, it is also common to make decisions based on things other than thinking or feeling. We may eat ice cream because it tastes good (a "sensing" decision), or we may add a second wing to a house we're designing because it completes the pattern (an "intuitive" decision). Jung called these non-judgmental decision-making techniques "irrational". (By "irrational", Jung meant only perceptive as opposed to judgmental; the word should not be construed as meaning "illogical" or "inferior".)

Jung proposed that people chose one of these four functions as their "primary" function, and used that function either introvertedly or extravertedly. Hence in Jung's system there are eight basic personality types:

Introverted Thinker

Introverted Feeler

Introverted Sensor

Introverted Intuitor

Extraverted Thinker

Extraverted Feeler

Extraverted Sensor

Extraverted Intuitor

You may ask, then, which of these eight types correspond to which of Hippocrates' four "temperaments"? Well, a little bit of thought and observation will show you that the Sensing types correspond to the Guardians and Artisans, and the Intuiting types correspond to the Idealists and Rationalists. But beyond that, the correspondence is murky. It was another forty-seven years before Myers and Briggs finally made the connection clear.

3: Behaviorism

Throughout most of the twentieth century, the science of human personality types fell into disrepute as other psychological ideas took its place. Most importantly, Behaviorism became popular. Pavlov and Skinner presented their theories that peoples behavior was all purely dependent on their individual life experience, and that the proper role and function of psychology was to induce people to adhere to "proper", "normal" behavior patterns by conditioning them with rewards and punishments.

Even today, after many studies have shown that behaviorism is a concept that simply does not work, modern introductory college psychology textbooks steadfastly continue to teach Pavlov's and Skinner's obsolete ideas to young students, while ignoring much more useful branches of psychology, such as personality typology.

There certainly is a hope that in the twenty-first century the psychology industry will advance to the point where personality-type models (and especially MBTI) are taught in high-school and college psychology courses as being the valid and useful things which they are.