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The End of Personality Types

The End of Personality Types

When Jung wrote, "It is not the purpose of a psychological typology to classify human beings into categories--this would be pretty pointless (CW, p. 986)", you might wonder why create a typology?  A close read of Jung's stated purpose of his book gives a big clue: to understand the psychology of types.  And when we dig deeper into what he means about the psychology of the types, Jung provides an array of principles and hypotheses designed to guide our thinking.  


Keep Jung's end and overall goal in mind when thinking about psychological type: "Everything good is costly, and the development of personality is one of the most costly of all things.  It is a matter of saying yea to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one’s eyes in all it dubious aspects—truly a task that taxes us to the utmost (CW 13, para. 24).”

The task of saying "yes" to yourself and being conscious is a precursor to current day writing on subject-object relations in human development, with the highest form of development being able to understand you have a range of choices and responses to give in a situation and the task is to learn which response will be most effective.  (For followers of Kehneman's System 1 and System 2 Forms of Thinking, Jung is suggesting System 2 is hard work.)  

But to be able to have choices, you first have to understand the range of possible choices you have.  Jung's solution to this was to outline a system of perception and judgment which uses "colloquial terms for very complex processes."  In Jung's framework, there are four avenues of perception (Se, Si, Ne, Ni) and approaches to judgment (Te,Ti,Fe, Fi) which make up an energy system of psychological resources.  He gave concrete examples of how these functions play out in daily life as an instructive device. 

Jung suggests three very important ideas, all of which have guided the development of the Pearman Personality Integrator.

Principle A:  Jung wrote, “The relation between subject and object is always one of adaptation, since every relation between subject and object presumes the modification of one by the other through reciprocal influence (PT, p. 331)." The Pearman Personality Integrator invites an individual to identify what is both natural and demonstrated among the eight mental functions.  How an individual is adapting to his or her challenges is essential to understand if a person is going to identify what he or she may need to utilize for greater effectiveness. 

Principle B:  Jung wrote, “…the products of all functions can be conscious…when its use is under control of the will (PT, p. 405).”  By suggesting "products," meaning behavior, Jung is alerting us that we need to understand the role of the eight functions in our life and to be able to name them in order to understand and ultimately use them productively.  The Pearman Personality Integrator allows each individual to look at how he or she is accessing and using the whole psychology of psychological type.   

      Principle C:  In letters on his work, Jung wrote, “The attitude-type (E or I) remains more or less consistent but that the function-type (Se, Ti, etc)is subject to all manner of changes                                                                           in the course of life (Letters, V. 1, 1937).”  Jung unambiguously sees that the power of Extraversion and Introversion in an individual's psychology is important to understand.  Further, the other functions are affected by human experience and contingent on an array of environmental demands.  For this important reason, the Pearman Personality Integrator provides for a deep dive into the dimensions of use of extraversion and introversion, and each of the eight functions.  

      There are some additional issues which I'll explore in future blog entries.  The point of this entry is to outline why the Pearman Personality Integrator seeks to provide each individual with a comprehensive picture of his or her psychological type, with all of its richness and complexity.

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