Psychological Type as a Contemporary Theory of Personality

Introduction

C.G. Jung, Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs are the key thinkers and researchers who provided the cornerstones of what is now understood to be the Jung/Myers theory of psychological types.

It's almost 90 years since Jung first wrote on the topic, nearly 80 since Katharine Briggs picked up a copy of Jung's Psychological Types and subsequently introduced its ideas to her family. The question arises, therefore, as to whether the ideas that underpin psychological type can withstand contemporary scrutiny, and how much.

This paper sets out on that task, in a preliminary fashion, by looking at the ideas underpinning psychological type and its associations with Jung's broader perspective. Certain details, therefore, may not be covered: certainly the whole of Jung's thought is not addressed.

Partly, this is because Jung did not outline a system as such, and he presented some inconsistencies, as have many thinkers over the centuries. If he had provided the systematic thought some people seem to require, I suspect we wouldn't be talking about him at all, much less examining his work.

When people write anything, they do so in their particular time and space. No–one writes outside these constraints. Jung, Myers and Briggs lived and worked in particular cultures at a particular time, when certain things were known or not known, certain behaviours were expected and so forth

Accordingly, in examining some underpinning principles of psychological type, we have to take into account the science, knowledge and constructs available to these people. While some of the ideas they favoured may not have stood the test of time, there may (or may not) be a current construct that has explanatory value.

Personality

Personality remains one of those undefinable terms. Many people seem to think it is coterminous with the word psychology and suffer a rude awakening when they find that, like psychometrics, personality is a minor part of the discipline. Like emotion, it seems an "unruly category." The construct as generally used implies extraversion, as in whether one "has a personality" or is assessed according to external behaviours. Normal discourse seems to follow this pattern.

Jung's perspective is more than a little different. His definition of personality requires a notion of a self that is purposive. Personality in this way is not actually general, but a vocation, or calling.

Whether Isabel Myers took this precise view is unclear; her contribution in this context seems to be the conversion of Jung's original descriptions which were pathologically oriented to what would more clearly constitute a "normal psychology." Certainly the MBTI in its common usage is designed to indicate preferences, without stating whether a person has taken up the call, but perhaps the unscored items on Forms prior to the current Form M, which have to do with impediments to type development, may be an aspect of Jung's view.

Personality, Measurement and the MBTI

Examining psychological type as a contemporary view of personality is not about measurement, Measurement can provide useful data for interpretation, but it is not the final story by any means. MBTI data can support the theory under which it operates, but it is not the theory itself.

I also take the view of Isabel Myers in that "measurement" is an inappropriate term for the MBTI, given its purpose as a sorter, not a measure of strengths, skills or facility. This sorter indicates to an external theory that has also been used as context and principle in its development and use. Taking the MBTI also necessarily includes feedback on its results, so the instrument itself doesn't stand alone in any case.

Personality in my view is also not about measurement, but more the interpretation of data gathered from a wide range of sources, of which psychology is only one, in the same way that psychometrics is a small part of the discipline of psychology. Psychological instruments can measure constructs, but, following Deutsch (1998) and Danziger (1997) they don't have to be real.

A good personality inventory is self-referential in that it sets up the taker for contextual responses and interpretation regarding the ideas behind the set of questions.

In this way, it's unnecessary to look for precise and absolute indications of Intuition and Sensing for instance, or to label the brain accordingly, although Extraversion and Introversion seem exceptions. It may be that these constructs are part of a general human process, or a number of them. Categories are always used to interpret research; they can be labels easily discarded when a better description comes along.

Finally, from a philosophical perspective, continuous scores and the instruments in which they are used, imply tabula rasa, or the blank slate view of the mind, popularised by John Locke and the empiricist point of view in general (Rogers 1995).

The difficulty with this approach is that its basic presupposition of the mind as an empty vessel that is filled by experience is scientifically false, irrespective of what theory of personality someone may wish to uphold. That's a key reason why interpretation is needed of measurement.

On the other side of the coin, C.G. Jung's ideas in general (with others) have been accused, following Popper, of being "nonfalsifiable and therefore unscientific" (Hergenhahn and Olson 1999). This of course may be a methodological problem for science more than anything else, a view Jung endorsed and would seem to apply to psychological measurement in its past and present forms.

Presuppositions of Psychological Type

1. There is such a thing as an individual personality, or self

This remains a contentious issue, partly because research is predominantly done with numbers of people rather than individuals in mind, but also because philosophies like post–modernism deny that there is a self, and drug interventions, diets, therapies etc. are based on generalisations (Hutchins & Kirk 1997). Notwithstanding that, the study of personality has revived in recent years generally under the term temperament or disposition, sometimes character (e.g. Kagan 1989). Often these have an extroverted bias, which also means that the energy component of Jung's extraversion is not addressed

2. At least part of this self is innate in terms of predisposition

Type theories were popular around the time Jung did his work in this field. A philosophical criticism of the type approach is usually essentialism, generally considered to be more a medieval approach However the acknowledgement of differences between human beings is a norm these days; the argument would be over how significant the differences are

It seems Jung thought that personality might happen at the quantum level (Meier 2002) and so wasn't necessarily easy to ascertain. Genetic was a term he also used, although that had a different meaning then than now.

Aspects of this claim are also part of the nature-nurture argument. Jung never said that type was exclusively nature: in actual fact the environment was always considered crucial for type. However discussions on nature-nurture are coloured by political and social considerations.

The development of psychological instruments coincided with Social Darwinism (usually Herbert Spencer's interpretation of Darwin and/or evolution) and the eugenics movement a branch of which became associated with views such as Nazism. At the same time, Franz Boas and his school of anthropology presented a solely cultural view of human beings.

The arguments surrounding type and the MBTI have to be seen in that context, particularly as these issues were very much alive in the United States over the period of Jung's writing and Isabel Myers' work, and in particular the pragmatic style of empiricism which is favoured. Jung considered himself an empiricist, but he was not of the school of Locke, J.S.Mill and William James. One also can't discount the profound and prolonged influence of B.F.Skinner in denying personality altogether, even his own.

The discussion still seems to be a significant part of the debate in psychology and sociology, notwithstanding that contemporary scientific research shows this to be a false dichotomy, and even in sociology, Runciman (1998), for example is one presents the now accepted interactive view of nature and nurture.

3. This self has evolved in humans over time

Jung's general ideas presume evolution and he was quite clear in this respect that this was his approach. However, it's unwise to presume that evolution means progress in any sense (Mayr 1991), or that humans evolve at the same rate at the same time. The notion of "evolved beings" is on that basis simply science fiction/fantasy and may simply relate to specific types (not necessarily Jungian) of humans such as shamans, prestigitators and so forth. Jung was aware of the latter approach to evolution, but perhaps not of the former.

A relationship between Jungian archetypes and evolutionary psychology/psychiatry has also been investigated (Stevens and Price 1996). Jungians in general would presume that humanity has at least a 2 million year history, in fact the archetype idea would hardly be plausible without it. In theory, therefore, Jung's ideas are incompatible in principle with a number of evangelical approaches to religious belief; in practice, this seems to be less certain, which is interesting, to say the least.

4. There are conscious and unconscious components of the self

Conscious/unconscious seems to have a couple of meanings in Jung that differ from the conventional view in that one may be consciously in the world, but unconscious with respect to one's calling to personality or type. The behavioural sciences have traditionally had difficulties with consciousness of any kind. Even something like Glasser's control or choice theory seem to me on casual reading to be rejecting the notion of the unconscious altogether, and this seems fairly clear as well with cognitive behavioural therapy (Crichton 2001). This is notwithstanding evidence in various fields for some sort of unconscious in human beings.

5. Type preferences have to do with generation and expenditure of psychic or personal energy

The notion of energy which Jung introduced with extraversion and introversion led to conclusions that he was a vitalist, a view of humans discredited in his time. Accordingly, extroversion, the common interpretation of Jung's idea, precludes this attribute. Today, however, the notion of energy expended or generated by humans is acceptable, and measurable (Brown 2000)

6. Type preferences are a bridge between the conscious and unconscious

It follows that if type preferences are developed over time through practice that brings them under control, then type is a bridge between Jung's conscious and unconscious. LeDoux (1998), although referencing Freud, provides support for this notion as well as, more particularly, emotion as something that comes from the unconscious.

This does two important things: it provides a centre from which to examine the role of emotions in behaviour, and in type terms it makes it easier to contend that feeling judgement is rational and not an emotional process.

It also gives support for the view that type is not solely to be found in behavioural expression, although that is currently the major way it is explained, notwithstanding that the preferences, archetypes and so on in Jung's schema are considered to be essentially content free, and are expressed in a combination of inherent responses and culture related situations.

7. Conscious use of these preferences require personal will and is purposeful

Jung's term here is borrowed from Kant and Nietzsche. Walter J. Freeman (1999) uses the term intentionality, borrowed from Aquinas, to describe what seems a similar process in the brain. This may be something like an unconscious choice, without the Calvinistic style associations of the cognitive therapies. Jung in any case considered that purpose for human beings wasn't exactly a conscious thing.

8. Pathologies arise when the predisposed preferences are not utilised, or suppressed

This is not something that can currently be assessed outside clinical or other observational experiences. There seems a clear distinction between the psychological processes inherent in type preferences and the rest of Jung's theory and the measuring of physiological responses. That can simply underlie a need for

This also has some connection to gene therapies and so forth. Much of the public literature refers to genes for x , y or z behaviour or, more accurately predisposition. It's worth noting that even in this research, predispositions to some illness or deficit are simply that, not actualities or inevitabilities.

Little attention seems to be paid to what happens in the system if a gene is removed or altered, the future implications (uncontrollable at this stage) nor the fact that the genetic code is but one component of what gets to constitute a human being. The discussions over the DSM (Hutchins and Kirk 1997) should be sufficient warning on the danger of overclassification or creation of syndromes and disorders based on a presumption of a perfect human being that has never existed, and is unlikely to ever exist.

I see this sort of thing as an extraverted thinking fantasy, but there may be more to it than that.

9. Preferences are comprised of sets of opposites

Apart from extraversion and introversion, I haven't located anything that goes beyond the realm of theory, psychometrically or otherwise. The Big 5 theory of personality, a psychometric approach that is focused on the NEO–PI instrument, uses similar constructs to the MBTI, but interprets them from the pathological perspective, also using negative language for one or other of the preferences. The claim there is that these are universal factors of personality in human beings.

While that may be so, a well–constructed psychological instrument like the NEO is self–referential in that the answer must be seen in the context of the constructs assessed. Whether they translate to actual categories in human beings is another matter.

Conclusion

I've argued in this survey of literature and research from a range of scientific fields, that C.G.Jung's theory of psychological types and aspects of his broader theory seem plausible: indeed there is much more supportive data than either Jung or Isabel Myers would have experienced in their lifetime. In–depth research may be more fruitful in this respect.

The theory, of course is not literally proven at this stage: my own point of view is that this is impossible in any case and a futile task. All we can do is to see how these ideas fit with what is known and the interpretation of what is known, and use that knowledge to understand the people and institutions we deal with, as well as ourselves. This is, I think, essentially what Jung, Myers and Briggs were after.

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Photograph courtesy of Jamie Johnston, CAPT Library. PETER GEYER (INTP) is a consultant, researcher and writer in the field of C G Jung's theory of psychological types. He conducts MBTI Accreditation programs and presents internationally on a regular basis. Peter is a life member of AusAPT and a professional affiliate of the Australian Psychological Society.