Peter Geyer
Type Coaching and Training
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Peter Geyer
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On "Personality"ICISTS Conference KAIST Daejeon Korea 17 July 2008 People and Qualities: The nature and type of participants in an Australian MBTI® Qualifying Workshop
Presentation
On "Personality"C.G.Jung and the MBTI®
Theory & Research
APTi IAC Research and Theory Articles
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CHAPTER 3 C.G.JUNG, AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES Myers and Briggs, by their own admission, would not have set out to develop what became the MBTI if professional psychologists had developed a practical application of Jung’s theory of psychological types. An understanding of C.G.Jung, his work, and his influence within American psychology is crucial therefore to understanding why his theory of psychological types was not applied as Myers and Briggs expected. C.G. Jung (1875-1961) is one of the seminal figures in the broad field of psychology. Analytical psychology, Jungian analysis, C.G.Jung Institutes functioning throughout the world and a widely distributed and still (perhaps increasingly) popular personal body of work that is interpreted and developed by various groups of Post-Jungians, give an indicator of his labours and influence . The lifespan of Katharine Briggs broadly parallels his, as does the development of psychology as a discipline separate from medicine and philosophy. Trained as a physician, Jung came to notice in the field of psychiatry through the publication of the method and results of his Word Association tests in 1905, in which he used Galton’s ideas (Jung;1981). This work also initiated a relationship with Freud, who was more well known, but whose ideas were then of limited acceptability. In 1909, he visited the USA, with Freud and Ferenczi, on an invitation from the prominent American academic and psychologist G.Stanley Hall, and presented his ideas as part of a group of seminars . Jung was to revisit the USA at three other times, but at no time could it be considered that he had a mainstream following for his ideas, within or outside the psychological community. Jung’s theory of psychological types arose from his desire to understand his relationship with Freud and its bitter ending. He was alsolooking at the ideas of Freud and Adler and asking why there seemed to be so many different psychologies, rathet than just one. For Jung, the answer seemed to be that the different approaches to psychology were related to the personality perspective of their founders . In a paper which was first published in 1913 (1976;pp499-509), Jung outlined his theory of psychological types in terms of opposite attitudes to the world, which he named introversion and extraversion. He developed his type theory over time, devoting a book to this topic, Psychological Types , which was published in German in 1921 . He further developed his ideas on the types in subsequent seminars, speeches and published papers over the following decade or more . Jung built his typology on the work of others (including William James), as well as from his clinical, observational and personal experience. Briefly put, Jung’s typology starts from his observation that what on the surface can seem random individual behaviour can in fact be predictable and understandable. His typology combined the notion of individual preferences for opposite attitudes to the world of extraversion (gaining psychic energy from the external world of objects) and introversion (gaining this energy from the internal world of ideas), and a cognitive model of perception and judgment. Here there are two opposite preferences for taking in information called sensing (through the five senses) and intuition (through seeing patterns and relationships) and two opposite preferences for making decisions called thinking (deciding through objective logic) and feeling (deciding through subjective values). Jung considered that each person used all of these preferences in their day-to-day activities, but preferred one of each opposite over the other. The interaction of these preferences was the core personality of each individual. These preferences also seemed to him to be part of what each individual brought into the world at birth and developed through interaction with the external environment . Jung also made it clear that these type categories were not pure and that there was much individual variation within each type . Although he had used Galton’s approach early in his career, Jung did not much care for mathematics as a whole, let alone as a preferred tool in his work and, although considering himself to be an empirical scientist throughout his working life, he preferred not to utilise statistical method. Because he was also not particularly rigid on how many types there might be (a necessary prerequisite for a statistical examination) such an approach would have been unlikely in any case (1966;p88). Jung wrote and spoke about psychological types in various forms and forums over a period exceeding 20 years and so responses to his ideas vary according to the situation and time. Extraversion and introversion, for instance, aroused broad interest and discussion in books and journals of the time. White devoted a chapter to the topic (1920;pp 217-45) and Downey, who had developed a test for what she called the Will-Temperament, acknowledged the use of Jung’s introversion and extroversion (sic) in her work in both book and journal format (1924;p13). McDougall described himself as “sympathetic to Jung’s peculiar views, but, while finding them stimulating and suggestive, [I] regard them as not yet sufficiently well founded” (1926;p25). A user and developer of Jung’s ideas on introversion and extraversion, McDougall also provided an outline of Jung’s 8 types but expressed a preference for the typological interpretations of Jung’s follower, Beatrice Hinkle (pp429-430) . Van der Hoop’s critique and elaboration of Jung’s typology (1923;pp132-198) and Roback’s general evaluation of character (1927), in which he included Jung’s types, are the only in-depth evaluations from this period and they may be counted as perhaps the only major texts sympathetic to typologies. Of other potential sympathisers, Hollingworth, writing in 1930, considered Jung’s types to be “very complex and confused...they become still more confused when Jung reminds us that pure types are rare; that there is overlapping and mixture of types; that the predominating function may not be merely one, but a combination of two that are not antagonistic...that is to say, his types are not types at all...”. Hollingworth went on to say that there might be something in introversion and extroversion, but that McDougall’s work in this area was more interesting (1931;pp492-493). Hollingworth and McDougall may be counted as supporters of instinct models of personality (Degler,1991;pp192-193) as against the prevalence of behaviourist views at the time. Griffiths also,writing about the typologies of Jung and Kretschmer, observed that “a survey of available experimental data points to the conclusion that with relatively few exceptions individuals do not fall into well-defined types as Jung and Kretschmer suppose” (1936;p483). It’s worth noting that a number of typologies were proposed at this time and so Jung’s ideas competed with other personality frameworks. A survey of the American Journal of Psychology and theJournal of Abnormal and Social Psychology over the period 1909-1946, as well as the Journal of Applied Psychology (1917-1946) and Psychological Abstracts (first published in 1927) reveals very few references to Jung himself or reviews of his work, even in the narrower context of personality. Of these, a number refer to his Word Association experiments rather than his typology. Occasional articles on introversion/extroversion predominantly refer to McDougall and others rather than Jung. When psychologists did respond to his typology, they also referred more to his original work prior to the developments described in Psychological Types . Kurt Danziger, making an observation in the broad context of the methods of American psychology of this period states that “the personality category of extraversion-introversion certainly did not owe its popularity to the fact that many American psychologists held Jung’s theoretical system in high esteem or were even especially interested in it. Rather, these terms were prised loose from their original theoretical integument and generally assimilated to prevailing popular conceptions of the `well-adjusted’ personality and its opposite” (1994;p239). Jung’s psychological types were also compared to work in psychology that was overwhelmingly American and thus overwhelmingly behavioural in theoretical orientation, as well as something that could be “used” . Consequently, Jung’s typology was not a central topic for American mainstream psychology, either for those few who were interested in this approach to personality, or in general. With the exception of the concepts of extraversion and introversion, professional psychologists were unsuccessful in satisfactorily measuring the other components of his typology. Indeed they do not mention it, finding his descriptions insufficient help in terms of devising an empirical method. The preferred personality approaches at this time were by Bernreuter, Guildford, Cattell and others, which emphasised quantification, and traits, rather than types . Quite clearly, Jung was unable to establish a network sufficiently influential for his ideas to be considered and effectively applied in the prevailing orthodoxy of American psychology in the period examined. Part of this can be related to the turmoil of World War 1 as well as what Ellenberger calls his “creative illness” (1994;pp670-673). The decade between 1910 and 1920 was a period of claimed success for quantitative methods in psychology and Jung did not produce any new material at this time. By the time of Psychological Types, American psychology is directing itself elsewhere. Noll (1994) has suggested Jung’s lack of success in mainstream networks was because he had decided to establish an alternate network from private seminars and his Psychological Club through what are now the various Jung Institutes, Societies and associated publishing activities. This view discounts Jung’s written output and activities of the time following the end of his “illness”, including his co-editorship of the journal Character and Personality dating from 1932 and even his visits to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. People in psychological circles certainly knew C.G.Jung was around. But like Freud, who gained more mainstream favour within American psychology at a later date, Jung’s work did not meet the expressed needs of influential American psychologists at the time. Being seen as a scientist, or undertaking work in a `scientific’ manner was also important to C.G.Jung. Throughout his writings, he presents a strong self-perception of being a scientist, identifying the status of his ideas in terms of empirical data and observing the separateness of the laboratory experiment from nature and the day-to-day . Part of his criticism of Freud in fact, related to what he considered the purely theoretical base of Freud’s ideas, i.e. they were not sufficiently empirically tested compared to his own, and he seemed genuinely bewildered at the greater level of acceptance of Freud’s views in communities identifying themselves as scientific, compared with his own work . He has not been entirely alone in this view (Progoff,1981;Kagan,1989), although a contemporary observation was that perhaps he protested a little too loudly (Rosenzweig,1940;p581). Myers and Briggs, in undertaking the construction of the MBTI, also clearly saw themselves as scientists . Consequently, notwithstanding their lack of formal qualification in this area, it is approriate to consider them as scientists, and their work as scientific and thus open to examination and evaluation from a scientific perspective . This is the aim of Chapter 4. |