Personality Type:An Owner's Manual
A sourcebook on the deeper meaning of C. G. Jung's system of personality type, including a simple-to-take test for determining your own type. Written for the popular audience, this book draws on pop-cultural trends, using comic strips, Star Trek, and movie characters to help us recognize in ourselves and others four distinct ways of knowing and interacting with the world.

What is Psychological Type?

imply put, psychological type tells us how we make sense of the information we're getting from the environment. After all, we're bombarded with signals from the environment all the time. How do we decide which ones to let in and which ones to filter out? How do we know whether we're seeing the same world that others see?

Carl G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher, began to think about these questions in the 1920s, at the point when he and his mentor, Sigmund Freud, were moving in different theoretical directions. Jung was puzzled by Freud's certainty that human motives derive from unconscious physical desire. As far as Jung was concerned, people are motivated by the need to adapt, and the search for pleasure is only one of our adaptational strategies.

During the same time period, psychoanalyst Alfred Adler advanced a competing theory of personality development, which located human motives in the fundamental need to establish power and control.

Jung gradually realized that the human personality encompasses all these things: the need for pleasure and relationship, the drive for power and control, and the motivation to adapt. Freud, Adler, and Jung had each emphasized motives that reflected his own outlook. Thus, each created a psychological theory whose application would always discover the aspects of human development that each man regarded as essential.

This led Jung to the idea that each of us sees reality according to our own "psychological type." He began to construct a unifying theory that would allow each view its own integrity. As he explored the many theories of personality that have been devised throughout history, he was struck by the fact that so many of them describe human character in terms of four basic classifications.

Astrology, one of our oldest personality theories, classifies character in terms of the four elements: water, air, earth, and fire. Greek medicine classified people in terms of bodily secretions and gave us our words phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, and melancholic. The tarot cards relate personalities to the four suits: wands, cups, swords, and pentacles, or our modern clubs, hearts, spades, and diamonds.

Jung began to realize that the four categories in each scheme are fairly consistent, representing four basic human ways of understanding reality. Freud, Adler, and Jung himself had been emphasizing only one of the four -- the one that corresponded to his own way of approaching reality.

The Four Functions

Ultimately, Jung concluded that we are all born with four psychological functions:

Sensation for direct perception
Intuition for perception of contextual meaning
Thinking for impersonal discrimination, and
Feeling for personal relationship.

Just as we can locate a place geographically by noting its relationship to the four directions, Jung thought of these four functions as compass points for the personality, by which we are oriented to our immediate situation.

We experience each of these functions from two distinct perspectives:

Extraverted -- for information that depends on outside sources
Introverted -- for information that depends on inner experience

Jung, with his strong interest in how all points of view are unified in the larger context, had been taking an Intuitive approach to personality development.

Freud had been seeing the personality in terms of Feeling -- the human need to relate to the environment and to decide whether the relationship is good or not. On this foundation he built a theory concerned with our negotiation of individual pleasures in light of social ideas about civilized behavior.

Alfred Adler had been emphasizing people's Thinking motives -- the desire for impersonal knowledge and the capacity it gives us to predict and control our conditions. His theory extended, therefore, to questions of power and justice in social systems.