Are You a Centrovert?

Are You a Centrovert?

I love the term “centroversion,” which I discovered when reading Steve Myers’ book:

Another associate of Jung, Erich Neumann, describes this new attitude as the personality embarking on a third direction, which is neither extraversion nor introversion but ‘centroversion.’ This is his own term for a new direction that is equivalent to individuation.

Myers-Briggs Typology vs Jungian Individuation: Overcoming One-Sidedness in Self and Society by Steve Myers p. 118

Our personality type makes us aware of how we are one-sided. In Jungian typology, the goal is to use our type as a stepping stone to individuation where we transcend our type and leave it behind. Myers says that “individuation begins only when we try to differentiate the inferior function.” When we give the inferior “full parity with the dominant” our consciousness collapses into the unconscious. We lose the certainties we used to have about life and confront the contents of our psyche. Marie-Louise von Franz describes it as follows:

When the fourth function comes up … the whole [conscious] structure collapses … This, then, produces a stage … where everything is neither thinking nor feeling nor sensation nor intuition. Something new comes up, namely, a completely different and new attitude towards life in which one uses all and none of the function all the time.

Lectures on Jung’s Typology by Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman p. 27-28

Ideally, the older we get, the more we should NOT fit the personality type of our younger years. We should become less one-sided. Myers conducted research for his PhD that involved gathering data on typological one-sidedness by country through an online self-report questionnaire. The results show that, both in the East and in the West, one-sideness actually increases with age. In my next post I’ll take a look at ways we can avoid becoming increasingly one-sided as we age.

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Your personality type is a verb, not a noun

An important way that Jungian typology differs from Myers-Briggs is that Jung believed that personality types aren’t static:

In Jungian individuation, type can change – for example, ‘the function-type is subject to all manner of changes in the course of life’ (Jung 1937b, p. 230) and type is nothing static. It changes’ (Jung 1959, p. 435).

Myers Briggs Typology vs. Jungian Individuation by Steve Myers

Jung also said that most people are “in-between types” and don’t fit neatly into a type category. This is probably why many people have a hard time figuring out their personality type:

Jung used a related analogy when describing the typological functions as ‘somewhat like the four points of the compass’ … There is an infinite number of locations in the world, but there are only a few landmarks. When we are orienteering, we do not usually describe our location as being permanently at a landmark, Rather, we describe where we are by reference to the closest landmarks … Similarly, our closest psychological type can change over time (Jung 1937, p. 230) as our individual personality changes. And the group of people who are in-between types are ‘the most numerous’ (Jung 1923, p. 516).

Myers Briggs Typology vs. Jungian Individuation by Steve Myers

The John Beebe 8 function archetypal model addresses these “in-between” types well with the use of shadow functions and his belief, also, that the functions aren’t static; our functions are like a cast of characters. Marie-Louise von Franz said that as we develop our functions sometimes we are a different type than our original for 10 years.

As I wrote about before, MBTI is about addressing the need for balance in consciousness, whereas for Jung type is for individuation and the emergence of a unique self that transcends type.

And speaking of balance, I’ll close with this quote from Jungian analyst James Hollis, one of my favorite authors:

I have no vested interest in our becoming saner, or mentally balanced, or even useful to society… We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.

What Matters Most by James Hollis

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Sources:

Myers Briggs Typology vs. Jungian Individuation: Overcoming one-sidedness in self and society by Steve Myers

Personality Hacker podcast episode 0364

Continue ReadingYour personality type is a verb, not a noun

Is your personality type a corpse?

Is your personality type a corpse?

Jung said that “if you identify with [a type] you identify with a corpse.”

That sounds harsh, but Jung believed readers missed the point of his book Psychological Types, which admittedly is a difficult book to read. His book was about the problem of one-sidedness and the conflict between the conscious and unconscious psyche. Readers instead focused on chapter 10 and used the book as a way primarily to categorize people.

As Steve Myers writes in Myers-Briggs Typology vs Jungian Individuation, Jung believed that being a type is a problem, not a virtue, because it “helps sustain the split between consciousness and the unconscious.” Type should be viewed as a stepping stone on the path to individuation, not a fixed identity:

One of the criticisms of Myers-Briggs typology is that it lacks a means of ‘changing how we see the world.’ Yet this change of attitude is the gravamen of Psychological Types. In Jung’s original vision, typology is the scaffolding of individual identity. It is not the individual building itself but it a necessary step in the construction process.

[…]

There is great value in the stepping stone of Myers-Briggs typology, but if we linger there too long the danger is that it becomes an obstacle to individuation.

Myers-Briggs Typology vs. Jungian Individuation by Steve Myers

Jung believed the dominant and inferior functions were two important poles between which development takes place. Uniqueness doesn’t come from developing one of the opposites, because that promotes one-sidedness. Jung used the analogy of a hammer, piece of iron, and anvil to describe the individuation process:

It is the old game of hammer and anvil: between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an ‘individual.’ This, roughly, is what I mean by the individuation process.

Myers-Briggs Typology vs. Jungian Individuation by Steve Myers

In summary, Jung’s typology is meant to be used in a Jungian context as part of individuation. “It was an an integral part of the foundation of analytical psychology” as Myers says. It wasn’t meant as a stand alone system to be used in isolation, which is the way it is mostly used today.

Source: Myers-Briggs Typology vs. Individuation: Overcoming One-Sidedness in Self and Society by Steve Myers

Continue ReadingIs your personality type a corpse?

The Cast of Characters of Your Personality Type: The function stack order in Beebe’s archetypal 8 function model

The Cast of Characters of Your Personality Type: The function stack order in Beebe’s archetypal 8 function model

John Beebe’s function stack of the personality type works like a cast of characters in a play, rather than in a rigid numerical order.

In most type systems the four functions are typically in a hierarchy, with your most dominant function being at the top, and your weakest inferior function at the bottom.

Beebe says that the 8 archetypes are subpersonalities found within all of us. The archetypes for the first four functions are: Hero, Parent, Eternal Child, Anima/Animus. The archetypes of the 4 shadow functions are: Opposing Personality, Senex/Witch, Trickster, and Demon.

For example, in considering your Parent function, it is viewed archetypally as how this is the manner in which you typically “parent” others. There may be times the shadow side of your parent function gets triggered. This movement and dynamic is always at play. So an extroverted feeling Parent function, for example, will at times have an Fi quality.

Also, because of environment, genetics, and your unique calling, the Parent archetype might not be as strong in you as it is in another person, whereas your Eternal Child archetype might be stronger. This is how his model moves beyond a “function stack.” It teaches us to think more archetypally rather than being hyper-focused on the function positions.

Here is how Beebe describes this:

As we move beyond the heroic first function, however, we should recognize that not all of the eight functions follow hero psychology in being measurable by their degree of strength. They do not, in actual experience, follow a descending hierarchy of differentiation from first (superior) through fourth (inferior) to eighth. Rather, the strength, and the kind of strength, a function of consciousness displays is a consequence of the archetypal role associated with it, and archetypes are differently developed in different people. The numbering of the positions is a bit of an anachronism, left over from the early days of Jungian psychology and of Isabel Briggs Myers’s adaptation of that psychology to the analysis of the MBTI findings. When I use numbering today, in these post-heroic times, the numbers are meant to be read as qualitative rather than quantitative…

Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type by John Beebe, p. 135. Emphasis mine

Another thing to keep in mind is that in Beebe’s model, the Hero and Anima/Animus functions form the spine of the personality and are used in forming our identity and our relationship to self. The middle two functions, Parent and Eternal Child, are the functions we use in our relations to others. This helps us process how we interact with self and others and make course corrections when needed.

For example, if your Hero function is extroverted intuition (Ne), and you notice that you’ve overwhelmed someone with a barrage of new ideas when they came to you with a problem, you can note that you slipped up in that moment and were using your Ne Hero function in a Parent way. As an ENTP it is introverted thinking (Ti) that is the healthy use of the Parent archetype. Another example is an INFJ type using Eternal Child introverted thinking when interacting with someone in a moment where Parent function was what was really needed from the person.

Marie-Louise von Franz said that when we develop our second and third function it is such a difficult task that sometimes “people actually become a different type, which was not their original type, for eight or ten years.” These Parent and Eternal Child archetypes are often in flux, which is important to keep in mind.

This cast of characters is always moving, sometimes in harmony and sometimes colliding with each other. Thinking in terms of these archetypes, rather than only on minutiae of cognitive functions, helps us improve our relationship with our self and with others.

It seems fitting to close with one of my favorite James Hillman quotes:

Her character must consist in several characters—“partial personalities,” as psychology calls these figures who stir your impulses and enter your dreams, figures who would dare what you would not, who push and pull you off the beaten track, whose truth breaks through after a carafe of wine in a strange town. Character is characters; our nature is a plural complexity, a multiphasic polysemous weave, a bundle, a tangle, a sleeve. That’s why we need a long old age: to ravel out the snarls and set things straight.

The Force of Character by James Hillman, location 793 of Kindle edition. Emphasis mine

Index to my other posts about the John Beebe archetypal 8 function personality type model

Sources used in this post:

Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type by John Beebe

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

The Force of Character by James Hillman (if you’ve never read a book by James Hillman this is a good one to start with)

Continue ReadingThe Cast of Characters of Your Personality Type: The function stack order in Beebe’s archetypal 8 function model

Personality types and the rising sign in astrology

To help you narrow in on what your personality type is, or to start getting more specifics about your personality type and how to work with it, your natal chart in astrology can help give this kind of insight.

John Beebe’s personality type model, which I’ve written several posts about, works especially well with astrology because his model is archetypal.

Your personality type shows you where you are one-sided. The chart gives context and points to the areas of life where that one-sided tendency occurs. It can also help you understand why, for example, your third function seems stronger to you than it does for others you know with that same personality type.

Astrology is nuanced and the archetypes are multi-valent, so it isn’t as simple as saying, “You have four planets in Taurus! You must be an ESFP!” The alchemy between personality types and astrology goes deeper than that.

When looking at a chart from the perspective of personality, the first thing to look at is the rising sign, which is the first of the 12 houses on the zodiacal wheel of your chart. The rising sign is what was rising in the east at the moment of your birth.

The rising sign, and the planet that rules it, is the one part of the chart that is personal and all about you. The other 11 houses are areas of life and much of what is there is outside you.

Ancient astrologers called the rising sign the “helm.” The ruler (or host) of rising was described as like a helmsman. They viewed life as like a journey across the sea and the helmsman helps steer the ship.

There are 12 zodiac signs and therefore 12 rising signs. There are 12 different versions of each rising sign when you take into account the location of the example, Virgo rising with helmsman Mercury in the 1st house. Virgo rising with Mercury in the 2nd house. And so on. So only 1 out of every 144 people would have the same rising sign combination as you.

As an astrologer one of the first things I look at is the rising sign and location of the helmsman. Right away that tells you some of the characteristics of the person and the area of life that is a focus for them.

I’ll have some examples in upcoming posts. Stay tuned.

Continue ReadingPersonality types and the rising sign in astrology

The Sacred Language of Personality Types

The Sacred Language of Personality Types

A way that personality typology can be unhelpful, and maybe even harmful, is the temptation to have an excessive focus on the externals of traits and behaviors.

In his book Compass of the Soul, John Giannini, who was a Jungian analyst, mentions the Celtic poet John O’Donohue, who wrote that “if we become addicted to the external, our interiority will haunt us…To be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity.”

Giannini reflects on O’Donohue’s insights by saying:

Since typology is so easily useful as a practical system, we can “become addicted to the external,” to a stereotypical language of traits. So most typologists treat the types as purely outer behaviors and cognitive traits. However, typology is also a sacred language that describes “our vulnerable complexity,” and encompasses a far-reaching theory with its multiplicities of human understanding and complex behaviors.

Compass of the Soul by John L. Giannini, p. 3

The sacred language of type, and acknowledgement of the vulnerable complexity of the psyche, tends to be glaringly absent from much of the online discussion about type, particularly the infotainment variety. The infotainment is fun, and I get a good laugh out of it sometimes. But type has something more to offer as well.

It’s reductionist to try to quickly fit a person into a type label. A typologist should interact with the person, ideally over a period of time. It’s a process and the language is sacred. A typologist should never forget the vulnerable complexity of the person before them.

Even when there is clarity between the two people that, say, ENTP is the best fit type, the ENTP-ness will be unique to that person and manifest a bit differently from others who have that same type.

Each type has imbalances between the dominant function and the inferior function. One way to address that imbalance in a way customized to that person is to use the sacred language of astrology and take a look at the person’s birth chart. I now have an offering on my Services page for a 30 minute consultation about your personality type using the language of your astrology chart.

I have been formally studying astrology the past two years and have a certification (all described on my Services page). In the weeks to come you’ll see more posts on this blog that combine type with astrology. The two can work together in meaningful ways.

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Sources:

Compass of the Soul by John L. Giannini

Continue ReadingThe Sacred Language of Personality Types

Was Carl Jung’s personality type INFJ or INTJ?

Was Carl Jung’s personality type INFJ or INTJ?

According to John Beebe, Jung’s type was INTJ. Jung described himself as an introverted intuitive thinking type. One must keep in mind his model had 8 personality types, not the 16 types developed under MBTI.

Sometimes I wonder if Jung’s type was INFJ. There is no doubt his dominant function was introverted intuition; even just a passing familiarity with the Red Book confirms that. These are things about his life that make me wonder if he had parent (auxiliary) extroverted feeling or parent extroverted thinking.

He spent several years at the beginning of his career conducting word association games with patients. This is how he developed his theory of introversion and extroversion and also learned about complexes by the way people would unconsciously react to certain words.

Jung also spent years working with schizophrenic patients, which further confirmed his theory of the collective unconscious.

A childhood friend of his said that when Jung was a child he was terrible at math. Whereas he was good at dominating groups of 50-60 students by engaging in speculative thought, which was foreign to the other students.

The above and other facets of his life make me wonder if INFJ is a serious possibility. If you have an opinion I’d love to hear what you think. For now I’ll default to Beebe’s belief that Jung was INTJ and that Fe was his trickster function.

Sources:

CG Jung Speaking

Energies and Patterns of Psychological Type

Continue ReadingWas Carl Jung’s personality type INFJ or INTJ?

Making type new for the 21st century: post-MBTI personality typology

Making type new for the 21st century: post-MBTI personality typology

Since Myers Briggs started to become popular in the 1980’s, many new offshoots of MBTI started to proliferate once blogging and social media arrived on the scene.

We now find ourselves in the situation where many people interested in type know very little the history of both MBTI and Jung’s typology and often have their own type systems, such as 16Personalities, with an emphasis on personal growth and validation. The emphasis is on infotainment and memes. Many of the ones that are popular YouTube fall into this category, such as Frank James and Objective Personality. Millions of people are interested in type thanks in large part to these people and there is valuable work done here by many individuals.

Then there are the “old guard” Jungians, including many analysts and therapists. They are mainly interested in type in the context of Jung’s ideas and tend to not have a social media or online presence. Their focus is on research and using type with clients. Many are now retired. John Beebe partially falls into this category, but he has done important work in bringing Jungian depth to MBTI, and there are many interviews with him online. These old guard typologists take ethical standards very seriously, such as not using type to evaluate someone’s job performance, and working with the person live and guiding them through a process of discovering their type. Whereas the infotainment variety of typologists is much more casual about, or ignorant of, the ethical standards and are comfortable with, for example, drive-by typing of people in comment threads.

Many, if not most, of the infotainment typology people are unaware of all the decades of serious academic research about typology that was done by the old guard. Dario Nardi talks about this in a recent episode of the Personality Hacker podcast. He said there are thousands of bulletin articles, peer-reviewed research, dissertations, master’s theses, and recorded talks in the MILO database on the Center for Applications of Psychological Type website (links to all of this are below in the Sources). You can search this database for all manner of topics, such as ADHD and type, autism and type, and so on.

Nardi says the 1960’s research about type was done by the Princeton Review and by EDS, the company created the SAT and ACT, and it was done in a professional, statistically rigorous, manner. The statisticians who worked on the current version Form M and previous Form G of MBTI were university faculty in psychology. The 400 page MBTI manual gives a complete description of the theory and methodology.

Ultimately, type is at the level of psyche, and can’t be described only by numbers and statistics. It is not fully amenable to the scientific method. Science alone doesn’t provide meaning, which is where the Jungian depth approach adds value to type. Hopefully in the coming decades we will see a greater integration of the old school typology with the new guard and more improvements in assessments and personality profiles.

Sources:

Dario Nardi interview on episode 363 of Personality Hacker podcast (the title says it is about personality subtypes but almost the entire interview is about the topics in my post)

Center for Applications of Psychological Type

MILO database

Continue ReadingMaking type new for the 21st century: post-MBTI personality typology

The History of Myers Briggs (MBTI)

A big problem with Jung’s Psychological Types book is that it is hard to read. Most people skip to the chapters where he describes the functions and type theory.

The seeds for MBTI were sown when Katherine Briggs read Psychological Types in 1923 and reportedly said “This is IT.” She wrote to Jung and went on to write to him four more times over the years. She met him in 1937 when he was in the United States for a lecture series. Katherine Briggs spent five years studying Jung’s Psychological Types. After that period she focused her attention on creating tools to bring Jung’s type to the masses. According to the book Personality Brokers, “She believed that knowing one’s type could save the soul of an individual while prompting him to assume the specialized offices that would help him advance civilization.”

In the 1940’s her daughter Isabel Myers became involved in developing the type survey. She said her mother wanted to make Jung’s insights more available to the average person. They wanted to contribute to the war effort by helping people understand human differences in the workplace.

In 1950 Myers sent Jung a three page description of MBTI. He wrote back and said “for any future development of the Type-Theory your Type Indicator will prove to be of great help.” Myers went on to dedicate her life to type and worked tirelessly to bring MBTI to fruition. She faced criticism for her lack of credentials. Undaunted, she went on to study statistics and her tutor, an engineer, said she had an intuitive grasp of it and soon surpassed him in knowledge of statistics. Her father helped open doors that allowed her to undertake extensive research in medical schools and high schools.

In 1957 MBTI attracted its first publisher and 60% of corporations were using personality types at that time. In 1969 clinical psychologist Mary McCaulley helped set MBTI on a solid course and it quickly flourished. In 1977 Myers was diagnosed with cancer. She finished her book Gifts Differing a short time before she died in 1980.

MBTI progressed from Myers’ dining room table to becoming internationally known and translated into multiple languages. Today type is roughly a $2 billion a year industry.

Jung’s Psychological Types is unapproachable for most people. But Isabel Myers went too far in the other direction when she said in a 1977 interview that MBTI could stand alone and did not need the context of Jung’s work. Unfortunately MBTI and other type systems place a focus on statistics and graphs over archetypes, patterns, dreams, and other soul work. Yet, without Myers and Briggs, Jung’s typology might have remained an obscure and overlooked work. Fortunately there are typology experts such as John Beebe, the late John Giannini, the late Daryl Sharp, Naomi Quenk, and others to help us benefit from the best of both type worlds.

In closing, we would all do well to keep Myers’ words in mind:

You psychologists, you’re always trying to find out what’s wrong with people,” … And this is not what type is about. Type is about how people reach their own special kind of excellence. This research is just a way for us to understand if people are having trouble on their pathway, how do we help them?

Personality Brokers by Merve Emre

Sources:

Personality Brokers by Merve Emre

Compass of the Soul by John L. Gianni

Continue ReadingThe History of Myers Briggs (MBTI)

The History of Jung’s personality types

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

Continue ReadingThe History of Jung’s personality types