The 8 Personality Types According To Carl Gustav Jung
Have you heard about the eight types of personalities he proposed Carl Gustav Jung ?
It is no secret that one of the main concerns of psychologists, historically, has been to describe personality traits. In some cases this has been due to the need to create more or less objective parameters with which create personality profiles useful for personnel selection, the description of client typologies or research into mental disorders and risk factors.
In other cases, it could be explained by motivations less related to the pragmatic. Ultimately, the simple act of bringing some order to the chaos of behaviors that human beings can exhibit can be, in itself, something satisfying. That is why several psychometric test (such as Raymond Cattell’s 16 PF) that have offered the possibility of measuring aspects of personality and intelligence in a systematic way.
Carl Jung, however, was not interested in this type of classifications because he considered them too rigid. This follower of the psychodynamic paradigm initiated by Sigmund Freud preferred to wage war on his side.
At the beginning of the 20th century, when psychology began to enter its adolescence, one of the most important representatives of the psychodynamic current set himself the task of describing the personality types that define us from a mystical perspective, fundamentally esoteric, and probably without taking into account the possible practical applications of its proposals.
His name was Carl Gustav Jung, and even if you haven’t heard of him, it is very possible that you have once used two of the terms that were popularized by him: introversion and extraversion.
Carl Jung and his approach to personality types
The relationship between Carl Jung, philosophy and psychology (understood as the exploration of the spiritual and the non-material) dates back to his early life and lasted until his death in 1961. During this time he attempted to describe the logic that makes the human psyche work and the way in which it relates to the spiritual world, using concepts such as the collective unconscious or archetypes. It is not in vain that Carl Jung is remembered as the founder of depth psychology (or analytical psychology), a new “school” distanced from the Freudian psychoanalysis in which Jung participated during his youth.
Carl Jung did not want to describe physical mechanisms that allow us to predict to a greater or lesser extent how we behave. He wanted to develop tools that would allow us to interpret the way in which, according to his beliefs, the spiritual is expressed through our actions.
That is why, when the time came in his career when he set out to investigate personality types, Carl Jung did so without giving up his particular vision of the immaterial nature of the mind. This led him to use the concepts of introversion and extraversion, which despite being very abstract, have generated a lot of interest.
The introverted and extraverted personality
Introversion has normally been related to shyness and extraversion to openness to meeting people. Thus, introverted people would be reluctant to start a conversation with someone unknown, they would prefer not to attract too much attention and would be easy prey to nerves in situations in which they have to improvise in front of many people, while extraverted people would tend to prefer socially stimulants.
However, Carl Jung did not define the introverted and extraverted personality by focusing on the social For him, what defined the introversion-extraversion personality dimension were the attitudes towards subjective phenomena (fruits of imagination and one’s own thinking) and objects external to oneself (what happens around us).
Introverted people, according to Carl Jung, are those who prefer to “withdraw into themselves” and focus their attention and efforts on exploring their own mental life, whether fantasizing, creating fictions, reflecting on abstract topics, etc. The extraverted personality, on the other hand, is characterized by showing greater interest in what is happening at every moment on the outside, the real, unimagined world.
Thus, introverted people would have a tendency to prefer to be alone than in the company of unknown people, but exactly because of their shyness (understood as a certain insecurity and a high concern for what others think of oneself), but as a consequence of what What makes them introverted people: the need to be interested in those people , maintain a certain degree of alert for what they may do, look for topics of conversation, etc. Extraverted people, on the other hand, would feel more stimulated by what is happening around them, regardless of whether it has to do with complex social situations or not.
The four basic psychological functions
In Carl Jung’s personality types, the introversion-extraversion dimension is mixed with what he considered the four psychological functions that define us: think, feel, perceive and intuit The first two, thinking and feeling, were for Jung rational functions, while perceiving and intuiting were irrational.
From the combination of each of these four functions with the two elements of the introversion-extraversion dimension, Carl Jung’s eight personality types emerge.
The psychological types
Carl Jung’s personality types, published in his 1921 work Psychological Types, are as follows.
1. Introverted Thinking
People belonging to the category reflective-introvertThey are much more focused on their own thoughts than on what is happening beyond them They are interested, specifically, in abstract thoughts, reflections and theoretical battles between different philosophies and ways of seeing life.
Thus, for Jung this type of personality is the one that in popular culture we could relate to the tendency to philosophize, the concern for the relationships between ideas.
2. Sentimental-introverted
People belonging to the personality type feeling-introvertThey are not very talkative, but friendly, empathetic and without special difficulties in creating emotional bonds with a small circle of people. They tend not to show their attachment, among other things due to the lack of spontaneity when expressing how they feel.
3. Feeling-introverted
As occurs in the rest of personalities defined by introversion, the personality sensitive-introvert is characterized by being focused on subjective phenomena In this case, however, these phenomena are more related to the stimuli received through the senses than to feelings or abstract ideas. According to Carl Jung’s definition, this personality type usually describes people who are involved in art or crafts.
4. Intuitive-introvert
In this type of personality intuitive-introvertwhat the person’s interest focuses on are fantasies about the future and what is to come.at the cost of stopping paying attention to the present. These people would be rather dreamy in nature, showing detachment from immediate reality and preferring to give space to the imagination.
5. Extraverted thinking
This type of personality reflective-extraverted is defined by the tendency to create explanations about everything from what the individual sees around them This means that these rules are understood as immovable principles about how objective reality is structured, which is why these types of people would have a very characteristic way of seeing things that changes very little over time. Furthermore, according to Carl Jung, they try to impose this vision of the world on other people.
6. Sentimental-extraverted
This category sentimental-extravert It would be made up of highly empathetic people, easy to connect with others and who really enjoy company. According to Jung, this type of personality is defined by the fact that it is related to very good social skills and a low propensity for reflection and abstract thinking.
In this type of personality sensitive-extravert the search for new sensations with experimentation with the environment and with others People described by this personality type are very given to the search for pleasure in interacting with real people and environments. These individuals are described as people who are very open to experiences they have never had before, so they show an opposite disposition to those who oppose what is unfamiliar to them.
8. Intuition-extraversion
Carl Jung’s last personality type, the type intuitive-extravertit is characterized by the tendency to undertake all types of projects and adventures of medium or long duration , so that when one phase ends you want to start another immediately. Travel, business creation, transformation plans… future perspectives related to interaction with the environment are the center of these people’s concerns, and they try to get the rest of the members of their community to help them in their endeavors ( regardless of whether others benefit as much as oneself or not).
Are Jung’s personality types useful?
The way in which Carl Jung created these personality types is far from what is attempted today, based on statistical analyzes and research involving hundreds of people. Not even in the first half of the 20th century did the methods and tools exist to create personality models with any robustness, nor did Jung’s thinking ever fit with the way of research followed in the scientific psychology very concerned with creating objective criteria to delimit personality traits and test theories by contrasting expectations with reality.
The Myers-Briggs Indicator has emerged from Carl Jung’s eight personality types, and the concepts of introversion and extraversion have greatly influenced important individual differences psychologists, but in themselves these descriptions are too abstract to predict the typical behavior of people. Sticking to these types of definitions of personality can easily make us fall into the Forer effect.
However, That Carl Jung’s proposal has almost non-existent scientific value does not mean that it cannot be used as a philosophical reference , a way of seeing ourselves and others that is suggestive or poetic. Of course, its objective value is not greater than that of any other classification of personality types that a person not trained in psychology or psychometrics can make.
