When Carl Jung’s relationship with Sigmund Freud ended, it had a big impact on his life, because he had been Freud’s designated heir. He wanted to understand why they ultimately couldn’t get along and knew that his introversion was one of the factors, as was his theory of types.

To help Jung process and understand his break with Freud, he wrote the book Psychological Types in 1921. This book went far beyond just understanding relationships differences and also aided him in formulating his concept of the Self (the archetype of identity and wholeness). His type system was markedly different from the temperament theory that had been dominant for the previous 1700+ years and Jung’s system is still influential today 100 years later.

Chinese taoism had a big influence on the development of Jung’s typology. As Jung said:

The book on types yielded the insight that every judgment made by an individual is conditioned by his personality type and that every point of view is necessarily relative. This raised the question of the unity which must compensate this diversity and it led me directly to the Chinese concept of the Tao.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung, pp. 207-208

Taoism is based on opposites – yin and yang. Jung’s typology is based on the play between opposites. When we are psychologically healthy, the opposites flow in harmony with each other. If we are one-sided and imbalanced, then we are challenged to start integrating the opposite. For example, an INFJ and INTJ can ignore inferior extroverted sensation for only so long before it forces a reckoning, often through a person who has extroverted sensation as the dominant function.

Jungian analyst John Giannini wrote:

So the task faced by every person, whether extraverted or introverted, is not just to consciously understand one’s type differences and fight the resistance to moving towards opposite types, but to seek help from the Self’s depth through prayer, dream work, or spontaneous insights in order to realize a more inclusive type consciousness.

Compass of the Soul by John Giannini , p. 59

A criticism:

Giannini wrote that Jung’s Psychological Types has been a problem because it is difficult for beginners to understand and Jung never systematically developed the types as archetypes:

Because of the book’s fluid and circular style and the breadth of its demands, because of Jung’s failure to systematically identify the types as archetypes, and because of the ambiguity of his views of the role of society in human development, Jung’s Psychological Types has remained too hard to incorporate into the whole of his psychology, and is thus too easily discarded by most analysts as well as typologists.

Compass of the Soul by John Giannini, p. 473

Giannini lauds John Beebe as the only typologist who has reintegrated the archetypes into Jung’s system. That is why I am a fan of Beebe’s work (click here for my post that is an index to all my Beebe posts).

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator was an attempt to make Jung’s typology more accessible and it certainly succeeded at that. My next post will be about the history of MBTI.

Sources:

Compass of the Soul by John Giannini

Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung

The terms temperament and personality get tossed about interchangeably, when in reality they are two separate concepts.

Briefly, temperament is innate, something we are born with and can’t change, whereas personality is shaped by both internal and external factors.

Ancient Greek philosophers, physicians, and physicists came up with the concept of temperament. Temperament means “mixture.” Specifically, temperament is a mixture of the four elements (air, earth, fire, water), the four qualities (hot, cold, wet, dry), and the four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm). Physicians worked to treat imbalances in the temperament.

Plato (fifth century BCE) was the first to call earth, air, fire, and water “elements” and said that diseases resulted from deficiencies or excesses in the elements.

Hippocrates (born 460 BCE) devised the system of the humors by applying the four elements and four qualities to the human body. The macrocosm (world) was correlated to the microcosm (body). As above, so below.

Aristotle (born 384 BCE) and Stoicism (began around 300 BCE) described the “active” qualities as hot and cold.

Galens (born 131 CE) was attending physician to Marcus Aurelius and was a follower of Aristotle and Hippocrates. He embraced the humor theory of Hippocrates and the element/quality theories of both Hippocrates and Aristotle, and also correlates the four seasons to the humors. His was the first holistic theory of health because it showed a connection between personality, mind and body.

By the time of Marsilio Ficino in the 15th century, the four humors of choleric, melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic were associated with psychological characteristics and not just physical ones.

The four humors are defined as:

Choleric – Decisive, independent, goal-oriented.

Melancholic – Low energy, deep thinkers, analytical.

Phlegmatic – Opposite of choleric. Passive, easy-going, timid, empathetic.

Sanguine – Buoyant, hopeful, confident, cheerful, robust.

All told, the temperament theory was dominant for around 1700 years.

Carl Jung, in his book Psychological Types, published in 1921, came up with the four cognitive functions of thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. He acknowledged a debt to the ancient temperament theory as a foundation from which his new typology emerged. However, Jung was critical of the temperaments:

The four temperaments are obviously differentiations in terms of affectivity, that is, they are correlated with manifest affective reactions. But this is a superficial classification from the psychological point of view; it judges only by appearance.

Psychological Types by CG Jung, paragraph 547

Jung said that a person who looks phlegmatic might actually be choleric on the inside and said that there needed to be a more objective system:

We have, therefore, to find criteria which can be accepted as binding not only by the judging subject but also by the judged object.

Psychological Types by CG Jung, paragraph 888

Jungian analyst Liz Greene, and others, have correlated his four functions to the four elements:

Earth = sensation
Air = thinking
Water = feeling
Fire = intuition

Dorian Greenbaum describes a theory that applies the four functions to the four humors. This associates the two “active” qualities of hot and dry with extroversion and introversion respectively, and also adds “wet” and “dry:”

Extraverted (hot) thinking or extraverted sensation (dry) = choleric
Extraverted (hot) feeling or extraverted intuition (wet) = sanguine
Introverted (cold) thinking or introverted sensation (dry) = melancholic
Introverted (cold) feeling or introverted intuition (wet) = phlegmatic

Combining the ancient concept of temperament with Jung’s typology is a way to enrich your understanding of your personality. Astrology is a way to find your elemental makeup, and also gives insights into personality beyond regular personality typology, which I will blog about in future posts.

Sources:

Relating by Liz Greene

Temperament: Astrology’s Forgotten Key by Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum

The demon function is the shadow side of the inferior function. It is the most distant from our ego consciousness but can deliver helpful insights in addition to the undermining ones. As John Beebe says, it is the part of us that is both devil and angel. When we act terribly, it is often through this function and archetype.

Beebe cites a Marie-Louise von Franz passage about the inferior function that he says is really about the shadow side of the inferior function. It stopped me in my tracks back when I first read it:

“The little open door of each individual’s inferior function is what contributes to the sum of collective evil in the world.”…Every German I knew at that time who fell for Nazism did so on account of his inferior function…The inferior function was in each personal realm the door where some of this collective evil could accumulate…The propaganda used the ordinary suspicions that people had against others on account of their inferior function”

Lectures on Jung’s Typology by Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman

She went on to say that the feeling type got caught up in arguments about party doctrine.

Intuitive types got caught up in their dependence on money and had to stay in their jobs even though they didn’t agree with the values.

The thinking types had their inferior feeling aroused; if you want to get a lie across to a thinking type you have to use a lot of emotion.

The sensation types could be persuaded that only dark possibilities existed unless Hitler’s vision was embraced.

So you can see why it is important to learn Jung’s typology. Our society depends on it!

Here is a list of the demon functions by personality type:

INTP and ISTP – introverted feeling (Fi)

INFJ and INTJ – introverted sensation (Si)

ISFJ and ISTJ  – introverted intuition (Ni)

INFP and ISFP – introverted thinking (Ti)

ENFJ and ESFJ – extroverted thinking (Te)

ESTJ and ENTJ – extroverted feeling (Fe)

ENFP and ENTP – extroverted sensation (Se)

ESFP and ESTP – extroverted intuition (Ne)

This completes my series of many posts about Beebe’s 8 function model (I like to think of it as archetypal typology). Soon I will post an index to all the posts and pin it to the type of my blog.

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Sources:

Lectures on Jung’s Typology by Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman

Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type by John Beebe