PETER GEYER

OTHER PEOPLES WORLDS: Language, type and being normal

Freewheelin' 5

Peter Geyer - Warrnambool, Australia

Who can know

the thoughts of Mary Jane

Why she flies

Or goes out in the rain............

Who can know

The reason for her smile

What are her dreams

when they’ve journeyed for a mile...................................................................Nick Drake (1970)

2. Going to see the river man

Going to tell him all I can

about the ban

On being free

If he tells me all he knows

About the way his river flows

I don’t suppose

It’s meant for me.............................................................................................Nick Drake (1970)

3. You might have told me

that love was not enough;

You might have lied

and told me that it was.............................................................................Jonatha Brooke (1993)

What can we know about human beings and their thoughts and desires? Are people ultimately a mystery, as Nick Drake suggests, in musing about Mary Jane? Is such knowledge also something that, even if disclosed, as in the rhyme of the river man and his river, is nonetheless excluded from individual grasp; not meant for some at all? Or something else altogether.

I suspect that something like this dilemma drew both C.G.Jung and Isabel Briggs Myers, in their separate ways and means, to the observation and study of human behaviour. Jung of course was not for quantifying; by necessity and culture Isabel Myers was drawn to numbers, although not in the conventional way. Averages were for her a means to an end. The important thing was to look at the individual person, how they manifested type in their way.

The manifestation of type of course changes over time and place. Behaviours are outcomes of other processes. Generalised categories like Baby Boomers, Generation X, or David Brooks' Organizational Kid , essentially a description of the hard-working authority respecting approach to life of contemporary young well-to-do American university students, are not about personality as seen through type. They really describe general social and economic patterns, not individual people. They are simply general behaviours acceptable and/or current at a particular time. Even the conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard liked Bob Dylan's music at some time.

If the conventional or young person acted differently in 1971 than in 1991 or 2001, but that says little about type, except perhaps for those groups who value convention. An INTP in Machiavelli's Florence wouldn't be interested in computers, for obvious reasons, but he/she may get a decent conversation from Nicolo himself, or feel relaxed with the ideas of Leonardo, both perhaps similar types.

This doesn't work all the time of course, in that with someone like the Karl Marx, clearly to me an NT of some sort you might get a drink and cigar driven polemic thrust in your direction. Karl apparently liked a pub crawl (Wheen 2000). On the other hand, Brooks' Organization Kids would probably be at home with Jean Calvin in Geneva, at least philosophically. Never have an idle moment, for there the devil lies! Not too good for introverts, really.

It seems to me that one of the reasons for this confusion between people and context is a concentration on what we see, in type terms extraversion of some sort, and a presumption that that's all there is. So we place emphasis, on generalisations of what people want and do through opinion polls and rating systems, very often with questions that keep us outside and don't lead us inside, which are then averaged, thus really leaving a lot of people out. Jonathan Shier's somewhat controversial ABC tenure is surely based around averages (i.e. ratings) rather than real people and their differences. But he's not the only one.

Partly, at least, this tendency is due to trying to make everything "scientific" - management, relationships, life in general and so in some ways attempting to eliminate the art of life. This is compounded by the strong diagnostic and medical influence in trying to understand people or, rather, trying to fix them up which, like most things, can have positive and negative consequences. There's no right type to be, but many people want to find out what that is. So eliminating diseases through gene therapy for instance also has implications for eliminating idiosyncrasies in human beings, something that not too many people who write about these things seem to be aware of. Futurists seem to forget about individuality at all. Perhaps we're all in our own box of learning and perspectives a little too much.

In that context one of the things that’s not expressed often enough about type is that it stretches/expands the boundaries and definition of normal behaviour and encourages as a consequence, a broader look at information about human beings. If we want to follow Jung more closely, we'll also critically examine this information and work out what's false or misleading. Valuing other views doesn't (or at least shouldn't) mean accepting things that aren't true, notwithstanding the all-pervading world of spin, where everything is relative.

The type perspective is a relatively simple proposition: if it’s good to be you, then what’s conventional for your type must be counted as normal. It doesn’t work that way, of course. The obvious differences between language and cultural groups aside, this is still fairly complex territory, and what’s normal or conventional varies. In any cultural context, the averaging complained about by Jung also tends to militate against broader definitions of normal.

And so, one of the differences between type and other personality perspectives is language. Is it good to be you or should you be fixed? It's not as simple as that of course, but the history of defining personality disorders isn't great science, or art for that matter. Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk have described the history and development of the DSM IV (the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders used by psychiatrists and others to assess patients) in less than glowing terms particularly with respect to the debate overr whether homosexuality was a disorder. While reading their book, I was reminded of Ray Choiniere's comment at the 1996 Temperament conference in Los Angeles about the DSM being "a social and political document".

Language can be rhythmic and lovely, even when describing disorders.The science writer John Horgan (1999) mentions dissociative fugue as an overwhelming urge to travel away from home or one’s customary place of work. I have the reverse problem at the moment, but I know a couple of people that might do that as normal practice. Horgan also gives other references such as antisocial personality disorder (impulsivity or failure to plan ahead) or attention-deficit disorder (fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes). Now if we were to take these words at face value, then specific types are clearly going to be in a lot of trouble, including me.

This is not to say that we should throw the baby out with the bath water, but I think we're in serious difficulty in recognising the gifts of others and helping them when they're in strife if the first step is to lock them into a medical diagnosis. And yet that is precisely what insurance companies and education departments do as normal practice.

Horgan's work is also relevant for an assessment of the use of drugs to regulate/assist other people's behaviour. Popular solutions for depression seem these days to be linked to either drugs or cognitive behavioural therapy, a variant of extraverted thinking. Neither of these are the universal panaceas that their supporters claim, and the use and efficacy, even danger of drugs in particular seems to be either under researched, or discounted.

This dilemma has been pointed out recently by the journalist Peter Ellingsen (2001) in observing a psychiatrists conference and the interaction between the professionals and the drug companies in attendance. A lethal side effect of a specific drug (for another, not the drug taker) alluded to in a legal judgement reported in The Australian recently.

In terms of research, Horgan's broad survey about what we actually know of the mind (summary: not much at all) and Elliot Valenstine's more specific critique (1998) should give us pause to reflect on what sort of society we want and what we think about when we want to diagnose and regulate the behaviour of the people who are in it, given that we are a democracy.

So a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and it can come out in surprising ways, at both the societal and personal levels.

Jonatha Brooke, for instance, expresses in her beguiling couplet (1993) at the beginning of this article a somewhat common relationship dilemma in wanting to be in a relationship at all costs, even at the cost of love, and the ambivalent, paradoxical quality of knowledge in that context– something like "I wish you'd told me, but why did you have to tell me at all?" Another way of putting this is "I'd like to know, but don't tell me", because this unsatisfactory situation, what I might want, is better than getting what I really need. This is a somewhat unacceptable state of affairs, one would think, but you may be surprised about the reality.

The Jungian analyst and author Polly Young-Eisendrath always has something important to say . She has recently addressed the issue of the significance for women between being wanted and being loved in relationships and life (2000). In this case, wanted is broadly about a disempowering, limiting and ultimately unsatisfactory situation, while loved actually has a quality of reality and self-acceptance about it, as well as acceptance by partner, mate, or whoever as to who that person is. She quite clearly presents that as a dilemma for women, but my reading suggested to me that there's more than something there for males as well. In any case, it takes two, as the popular folk philosophers Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell proclaimed a few decades ago.

It follows from this, both inside and outside personal relationships, that you can be wanted for your knowledge, attribute or skill, but not actually loved, or seen as who you are. Much of our energy in finding things out about people in fact is about what's wrong with them, as I've suggested. You rarely hear a politician complimenting their opposition for a new idea or opinion, indeed, as the social researcher Hugh Mackay points out (2001) the main aim these days for this group of people is to seem as unreal as possible in both language and presentation. Paradoxically, this doesn't seem to endear them to their clientele (the voter) all that much, which makes me wonder.

Maybe it's all a hopeless task and indeed some seem to have given up, although I suspect it's got a lot to do with what's euphemistically called "spin" these days, where it's not actually what you say, but what it looks and sounds like that's important. It'll save us money on education at any rate. If there's minimal content, or the content hasn't much reality to it, then people won't need to know how to evaluate it or query it and perhaps like Brooks' subjects might do simply reach for Huxley's soma or its modern-day equivalents in pharmaceuticals and entertainment.

Doesn't seem to me to be the world of Jung or Myers at all, but who knows the way the river flows?

References:

Jonatha Brooke the Gilded Cage (Dog Dream Music, ASCAP) from the album by The Story:The Angel in the House Elektra CD 9 61471-2 (1993)

David Brooks The Organization Kid in Atlantic Monthly Vol 287 No 4 April 2001 pp 40–55.

Ray Choiniere Temperament and Madness a presentation at Personality Organizations and the New Science: A Temperament Users Conference Newport Beach Ca USA 22 June 1996 (from personal notes)

Nick Drake River Man and The Thoughts of Mary Jane (Warlock Music Ltd.) from Five Leaves Left, Island CD IMCD 8/842 915-2 (1970/2000)

Peter Ellingsen "Nature versus nurture: the battle for the soul of psychiatry" in The Age Saturday News Extra 26 May 2001 p2

Peter Geyer Leading with Type an address to the 5th National AusAPT Conference Melbourne Australia 30 November 2000.

Peter Geyer Depression and Type a paper presented at the 5th National AusAPT Conference Melbourne Australia2 december, 2000.

Claire Harvey and Monica Videnieks The New Abuse Excuse in The Australian Friday May 25, 2001 p14

John Horgan The Undiscovered Mind: how the brain defiies explanation (Phoenix 1999)

Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk Making us Crazy-DSM The Psychiatric Bible and the creation of mental disorders (Free Press, 1997)

Hugh Mackay "What do we want? Politicians who are real" in The Age Saturday News Extra 26 May 2001. p7

Elliot S. Valenstein Blaming the Brain: The truth about Drugs and mental health (Free Press 1998)

Francis Wheen Karl Marx (Fourth Estate 1999)

Polly Young-Eisendrath WEomen and Desire: Beyiond wanting to be wanted (Judy Piatkus, 2000)

Published in the Australian Psychological Type Review Vol . 3 No 2, 2001