Psychological Types (Analytical Psychology)

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PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES (ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY)

Carl Jung's discrimination of human consciousness according to its functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition) and habitual attitudes (extraversion and introversion) was his attempt to provide a psychology of experience with a critical orientation in sorting out the empirical material of psychic dispositions, tendencies, and convictions. Jung's first presentation of the idea of psychological types was in a lecture delivered at the Psychoanalytical Congress in Munich during September 1913. He noted the striking difference in attitude toward the external world between patients diagnosed with hysteria and those diagnosed with schizophrenia in terms of intensity of feeling, the former displaying an exaggerated emotivity with regard to the environment and the latter an extreme apathy. He also noted characteristic differences in thought content: the fantasy life of the patient with hysteria may be accounted for in a natural and human way by the antecedents and individual history of the patient, whereas the patient with schizophrenia consciously experiences fantasy closer to dreams than to the psychology of the waking state in having a distinctly archaic character, with mythological creations more in evidence than the personal memories of the patient.

From these facts, Jung concluded that hysteria is characterized by a centrifugal movement of libido, which he called extraversion, and schizophrenia by a contrary movement, which he called introversion, toward the core of the personality (which he later called the self ). Although Jung recognized that in these two clinical syndromes he was witnessing regressive extraversion and regressive introversion, he nevertheless concluded that there was in the development of consciousness a normal distinction between the two movements of libido. Extraversion, he postulated, tends naturally to bond and even merge with objects in the outer world, while introversion naturally turns away from such objects in order to link up with the internal objects that Jung eventually called archetypes. Kenneth Shapiro and Irving Alexander have subsequently noted that these two movements of libido are constitutive of experience itself for the different types, experience only being experience for the extravert when it is shared with another person or object in the outer world and, for the introvert, when it matches up to some a priori archetypal category or capacity to experience just that type of thing. The theory of psychological types itself is an introverted way of thinking about experience and making it real, which may account for its difficulty for psychologists using an extraverted attitude.

In the years between 1913 and 1921, when the book Psychological Types finally appeared, Jung developed the theory to include what he called the functions of consciousness, which he named sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. Whether deployed toward objects in the outer world or toward the inner world of archetypes, sensation gives consciousness the practical sense that an object is really being presented to it; in other words, that it is, thinking gives it a name, feeling assigns it a value (for which reason Jung's feeling is sometimes replaced by analytical psychologists with the word valuing or with feeling valuation ) and intuition grants consciousness a direct, uncanny perception (from the perspective of the "absolute knowledge" of the unconscious) of the origin and fate of the object, as Jung puts it "whence it arises and where it is going."

For Jung sensation and intuition are irrational functions in being functions of perception which are irrationally "given." Thinking and feeling, by contrast, are rational functions, being choices, in the sense of judgments by consciousness, as to how to discriminate among objects that are perceived.

That individuals develop consciousness in different ways, according to their preference for using certain functions over others has led the theory of psychological types to be used to type people and to predict their likelihood to succeed in certain professions. A test based on Jung's model, known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), has had widespread use in the United States. The MBTI uses categories of judging and perceiving to distinguish Jung's rational and irrational extraverted functions. In typing the preferred mode of consciousness of an individual, an attempt is made to define the person's typical "superior function" according to whether it is extraverted or introverted, whether it is most characterized by sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition, and whether it is rational or irrational.

There will normally be an auxiliary function that is "different in every respect" providing the individual with an alternative mode of consciousness with which to meet inner and outer situations. In depth psychological work, it is also important to define the "inferior function" which, though much less easily differentiated into a conscious competence, is the place one most often experiences unconscious complexes and conflicts.

John Beebe

See also: Analytical psychology; Animus-Anima; Extroversion/introversion (analytical psychology); Midlife crisis.