Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Personality Brokers: A Point of View

Engaging. Informative. Speculative. Illuminating. Irritating. Thoughtful. Mistaken. These terms describe  Merve Emre’s new book, The Personality Brokers (in the US) and What’s Your Type? (in Australia and Europe), published by Doubleday.  Emre brilliantly used sources in multiple places to support her historical rendering of the family environment and passions of the mother-daughter duo who are responsible for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® assessment.  She managed to expose a host of attitudes, reflective of the time, and of the unique character of the individuals involved.   Emre’s real goal, however, is to use the popularity of the MBTI® tool to expose issues in the use of psychological tools in organizations.  She is right to point out that using personality based tools for selection and promotion is problematic and typically doesn’t end well for the individual or the organization.  Noting that individuals are being improperly evaluated from a self-report tool is precisely
1 comment
Read more

A Judgment System: Thinking

Thinking—Logical, Analytical, and Outcome Oriented (or so the rumor goes) Ever wonder what all the fuss was about when it comes to being analytical?  Some folks are very basic in their use of thinking—-meaning they are quick to see gaps or problems and they think their job is done.  A more complex use of thinking is to begin with a perspective of multi-variate factors and exploring the underlying and intersecting systems in a situation.  It isn’t so much about finding the gaps as understanding the logic of factors, or as Jung put it, “following its own law s, [Thinking] brings the contents of ideation into conceptual connection with one another” (pp:830, page 481).  You have these ideas that you connect in a way that seems logical. Judging functions serve to provide a way to evaluate information and experiences so there is a basis for action or conclusion.  While the completeness and quality of all decisions begin with the kind of information that is used which the perceiving
Post a Comment
Read more

What does empathy have to do with judgment? A look at the engine of judgment.

                                            What does empathy have to do with judgment?                                         A look at the engine of judgment: Thinking and Feeling. For many years I’ve had participants in psychological type workshops say to me, “How can Feeling be a rational judgment?”  “What does Feeling have to do with making decisions?”  “How is empathy related to making a choice or in judging something?”  When I’ve been with experienced long time consultant or facilitator users of psychological type assessments, I’ve asked the following and usually get silence in response:  “If Thinking is a rational judging process, how is Feeling rational?”  I’m willing to bet there are a number of readers of this blog who have had the same thoughts or questions, and have simply defaulted to, “that’s the model Jung put forth.”  Our perspective on this has a significant impact on how we present type to others and how we learn to use type processes productively. All of
1 comment
Read more