Hugh R. LeSure - Timely Types: The Psychology of Personality: From Jung to Myers and Briggs

Timely Types

TIMELY TYPES

The Psychology of Personality: From Jung to Myers and Briggs

Hugh R. LeSure

edited by Shawn LeSure

A TETRAGRAM PRESS BOOK

Copyright 2017 by Hugh R. LeSure

Published by Tetragram Press

ISBN 978-0-9993989-2-0

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, Myers-Briggs, MBTI and MBTI Logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of the MBTI Trust, Inc., in the United States and other countries.

To those for whom belief is not enough

The difference between the natural individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one thats consciously realized, is tremendous. In the first case, consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case, so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light, and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light which shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it.

Jung

I nscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi were the words know thyself. These famous words have served as inspiration to generations of the worlds greatest artists, thinkers and philosophers, including Socrates. In Apology , Plato informs the reader that, according to the oracle at Delphi, there was no one wiser than Socratesan assertion Socrates did not boast about but put to the test. Socrates believed that by finding the wisest of his contemporaries and examining their insights, he would prove the oracle was wrong about him. He, therefore, sought out politicians, poets, and artisans, but his investigation only confirmed the oracles statement:

Although I do not suppose that [any] of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than [they are] - for [they] know nothing, yet think that [they] know. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of [them].... I was conscious that I knew nothing at all.

It is natural to wonder how someone who claims to know nothing at all could come to know that the oracle was correct; and if one reads Platos other dialogues, it becomes clear Socrates knows quite a lot and is respected for his knowledge. The illogic is palpable and must have been obvious to someone of Platos intellect. Clearly, this nothing is actually something, but what could it be?

It would be well to consider art because in the great works, the whole of the human spirit shows its face. Beethovens Ninth Symphony, with its triumphant Ode to Joy finale, has a sorrowful and dark beginning. Salvador Dalis The Persistence of Memory not only unites foreground and background, high and low, light and shadow, it also combines the familiar with the bizarre and, most famously, explores softness in contrast to hardness.

The same principle is at work in the sciences. Newton saw it when he wrote, To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Furthermore, there are positive and negative numbers, electrons and protons, motion and repose, macroscopic and microscopic, empirical and theoretical, depth and height. The principle is also operative in daily life, for there is no mountain without valley, no parent without child, no conservative without liberal.

Carl Jung saw this principle of opposites at work in the human mind. The pair of opposites with which Jung was most concerned was the conscious and unconscious minds, a pairing that results in other further oppositions: introversion and extraversion, feeling and thought, sensing and intuition, rational and irrational, ego and shadow, objective and subjective. Central to his theory of types are these opposites, which Jung spent a significant part of his career not only exploring but working to reconcile. Jungs landmark book, Psychological Types , was first released in German in 1921 and in English in 1923. The book is brilliant, but not written for the common person, and it relies on many anachronistic examples to illustrate the case. Therefore, the book is inaccessible to all but the most dedicated students of type theory.

Enter Isabel Myers and mother, Katharine Briggs. Without their work, most people would know nothing of Jungs theory. Myers and Briggs made Jungs theory accessible to the masses by providing the four-letter codes, like ESTJ or INFP, that are now familiar to people all over the world. Though the pair did an excellent job simplifying the theory, their effort had the effect of taking Jungs type theory out of the broader context of his work. As a result, Myers and Briggss efforts have weathered some harsh attacks that Jungs wider theory has not.

There are many reasons for this discrepancy, but chief among them is how common it is for people to disagree with descriptions of their type. That is hardly surprising because the descriptions are often caricatures based on the average appearance of the type, but appearances can be deceiving.

Some of those problems are unavoidable since it is impossible to boil an individual down to an averagequite the reverse because an average is based on a collection of individuals. While many do an adequate job of describing the average conscious behavior of each type, most descriptions neglect to account for the unconscious point of view, which to Jung, would be inexcusable because it is equivalent to describing half the person.

Jung seemed to believe the aspects of psychological typing in need of the most clarification were introversion and extraversion, even pointing out that while Freuds theories sufficiently accounted for the extraverted attitude and Adlers for the introverted, neithers theories could account for the totality of peoples psychological experience. Psychological Types , therefore, devotes a great deal of energy to outlining the differences between introversion and extraversion, stating the introverted standpoint is one which sets the ego and the subjective psychological process above the object and objective process, while the extraverted standpoint, on the contrary, subordinates the subject to the object, so that the object has the higher value. In comparison to introversion and extraversion, Psychological Types dedicates little time to the distinctions between sensation and intuition, or thinking and feeling.

Timely Types is the first in a series that tackles the nature of this nothing about which Socrates spokea series that explores this subject from both psychological and philosophical perspectives. The series will look back to what great minds have said on the subject and consider future implications because psychology and philosophy apply not only to the present time, but also the past and future.

The following chapters are a decidedly psychological look at Socratess nothing and lay the groundwork for further investigation. Because Timely Types places oppositions at the center of its examination, it should be easy to grasp the foundations of type theory, which will be discussed comprehensively. Every cognitive function is treated in-depth as are introversion and extraversion. Unique about the type descriptions offered here is the way in which they are broken down. The introverted and extraverted psychologies are explored independently and only then united for complete descriptionsdescriptions that account for every cognitive functions operation. In this way, Myers and Briggss familiar terminology is kept intact, while allowing the descriptions to incorporate larger swaths of Jungs theory.