Psychological Types

"Before Jung came out with the book in the earlier twentieth century, there was a lot of skepticism about both psychoanalysis and analytic psychology. This was mostly from behaviorists in the United States (such as John Watson) who thought that psychoanalysis and analytic psychology mystified how we talked about people so that we didn’t have to engage in real observational research. But in 1923, Psychological Types comes out, and it seems to re-up the idea of a psychology that is mystical in nature—the idea that there are human characteristics that are innate and unchanging, that exist somewhere in the soul of mankind. Of course, the soul for someone like Watson is what you can’t see or hear or observe in any way. There’s no way of empirically verifying the activities of the soul. For him, Psychological Types represents a retreat into psychology as the mystical, and it makes the psychologist into a kind of shaman or religious leader. If you read all 600-plus pages of Psychological Types , you will see that it’s a survey of many different systems of belief—Eastern and Western, theological and aesthetic—from the beginning of recorded human history, to see how they can all be placed into the schema that Jung has set up. Jung argues that there are distinct and differentiable types of people in the world, by which he means that people exhibit certain “habitual attitudes” throughout their lives: there are people who are extroverted and introverted types, sensing types and intuitive types, and feeling and thinking types. Psychological Types is Jung’s grand attempt to re-write every single philosophical system according to those new dimensions. “Jung argues that there are distinct and differentiable types of people in the world, by which he means that people exhibit certain “habitual attitudes” throughout their lives.” It’s an extraordinary book not only for how ambitious it is, but also for the extraordinary acts of close reading it provides throughout: extraordinary interpretations of Plato, Aristotle, Goethe, Schiller, Freud, William James. Jung is determined to engage with all these different texts and different characters, real and literary, to try to draw out from their actions and their writing evidence of their souls. Katharine Briggs originally discovered Watson’s review of Psychological Types in The New Republic in 1923. She ordered it, and read it in the midst of a terrible depression. Her daughter Isabel had just left for college; she was a quintessential empty-nester and didn’t know what to do with herself. Understanding Psychological Types became her life’s work from then on. She attended to it with a religious devotion: she’d write out passages from it in her notebook, on 3’’ x 5’’ index cards she kept at her bedside table. Eventually, she started sending Jung letters, asking him to clarify what he meant in different parts of the book. Most importantly, she started typing herself and the people around her. She believed that the language of type Jung developed in the book offered her a way of understanding things that had previously seemed inscrutable to her: basic differences between her husband and herself; why it was that she felt so alienated by his cold, logical approach to life; why it was that he often perceived her as hysterical. She believed that Jung’s dynamic of thinking and feeling gave them a language not just to understand but to appreciate their differences without each trying to change the other person. On the one hand, it does seem scientific. It’s beholden to the observation of people’s psychological “mechanisms” or “functions,” according to Jung—it has an empiricist coloring to it. On the other hand, Briggs believes that the point of language of type is to access one’s soul. Her larger aspiration is to figure out how people can speak to and about their souls in a way that will guarantee them salvation. Jung inspires that in her. She transmits that language of type to her daughter, and it becomes the cornerstone of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. Three of the four categories that the MBTI purports to measure today—introversion and extroversion, sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling—are all directly taken from Psychological Types . To me, what’s interesting is that the definition of those terms have really drifted over time. We see this with extroversion and introversion, which are probably the most well-known of Jung’s dichotomies. Today we tend to think of a preference for extroversion as aligned with behavior like sociability, talkativeness, and we tend to think of a preference for introversion as aligned with being quiet or shy. But that’s not at all what those categories meant to Jung, and not what they meant to Katharine Briggs either. Initially, an extrovert was somebody who was an extraordinarily chameleonic figure. An extrovert was always shifting their sense of self and self-presentation to align with whatever the demands of their external circumstance were, while the introvert was someone who had such a strong, unyielding sense of their own subjectivity that they refused to change themselves according to external circumstances. Yes! The example that Jung gives in the book is that on a blustery day, the extrovert is the person who says they’ll put a coat on when they go outside because they don’t want to get cold, and the introvert is the person who says, fuck it, I’ll go outside as I am and let the elements do their worst. But that has very little to do with the way we use the words introvert and extravert today. They’ve taken on the language that is appropriate to their use in corporate environments and hierarchies. The question of whether you’re talkative or withdrawn, sociable or shy is important when you’re assessing people to see how they fit into certain group dynamics, right? It’s very much being part of an institution, being part of a group. But for Jung, that was not the original purpose—it wasn’t for institutional assessment, but for self-discovery."