Tracking the Elusive Human, Vol. 2

Chapter 2: The Use of Psychological Types

 

With the publication of Psychological Types the terms introversion and extraversion came into general use and the book found three distinct audiences.

First, non-Jungian psychologists attempted to create written instruments to measure introversion and extraversion (while they ignored the four functions): Freyd (1924), Heidbreder (1926), Conklin (1923), Guthrie (1927), Campbell (1929), Ball (1932), etc. J.A. Browne has called this the early metric stage which was then followed by the more advanced metric stage of factor studies by Guilford, Cattell and Eysenck. This level has, in its turn, been superseded by what we may call the supermetric in which enormously complex analyses of questionnaires yield matrixes of 300 x 300 or 600 x 600 items which demand the use of sophisticated computers. This is a current of thought we will encounter only in passing.

The second audience for psychological types is in the circle of Jungian analysts. For example, Beatrice Hinkle, one of the first New York Jungians who had introduced Jung to America apart from Freud by translating his Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, described what she called objective, simple and subjective introverts and extraverts in her 1923, The Recreating of the Individual: A Study of Psychological Types and Their Relation to Wholeness. (Henderson, p. 11) Another early Jungian analyst in the United States, James Oppenheim, wrote a book which appeared in 1931 entitled, American Types. It tried to put types in an American perspective and made an attempt to develop a physiognomy of the types based on an equation of facial features with the various Jungian types.

The third audience were the creators and users of distinctively Jungian psychological type tests. And it is these last two groups that we will examine in this chapter.

Typology in Professional Jungian Circles

It would be easy to assume that the process of becoming a Jungian analyst would, by itself, produce a typological expert. This is not the case. It could, and does so in some instances, but it does not have to. Individuation seen from the point of view of the collective unconscious is not identical with individuation seen from the perspective of the different kinds of consciousnesses. The experience of one does not automatically confer the experience of the other, though the training that the analyst undergoes could easily blossom into a penetrating typological understanding.

In 1972 Plaut reported on the results of a survey of 173 analysts. He found that about half (53%) of the analysts found typology helpful in their analytic practice, and this total was arrived at by combining those who thought it often helpful with those who thought it was sometimes helpful. Three-quarters of the analysts were confident of their type, and three quarters thought it important in general psychology. These results confirm the fact that typology and the actual experience of analytical psychology are not identical, and they can also be interpreted to mean that since a greater number of analysts saw a role for types in general psychology than saw one in their own practice, there is something or some things in the analytical process that discouraged the use of typology. There are a number of possibilities of what these things might be:

1. Types have an easy affinity for explaining interpersonal relationships, while most analytic work is directed to the individual.

2. Creativity and neurosis, both common in those being analyzed, and both bringing up material from all parts of the psyche, make type recognition more difficult. If types have an affinity for interpersonal relationships, they also have a certain predilection for normalcy.

3. Types cannot be employed unless they are learned, and training analyses and the various lectures of the training program may or may not contain type material.

4. It is extremely difficult to understand types intrapsychically and explore their continuing relationship with the process of individuation. Even though Jung had to work out typology as his compass on the voyage of individuation, he did not spend much energy illustrating how situations within analysis could be understood typologically.

It is this last point that is critical for the future use of typology in analysis. Meier clearly presents the issue when, following one of Jung's early seminars, he draws a typological diagram in which both analyst and analysand are represented as circles or typological mandalas. He feels that it is important that the analyst be able to rotate his typological mandala "so as to produce a tension of opposites with regard to the system of the analysand, so that something really can happen and things can really be constellated and problems can really come to a head." ("Psychological Types and Individuation", p. 282-3) In this way he brings to life within the analytical situation his statement: "Individuation begins and ends with typology." (p. 276)

These perceptive comments of Meier were taken up by C.J. Groesbeck and combined with other indications in Jungian literature and given a more detailed and thorough development in his "Psychological Types in the Analysis of the Transference". This paper represents one of the most penetrating explanations of the dynamic nature of typology. Groesbeck carefully examines Psychological Types, especially Chapter II, and explores its implications by using types as a guide to the "vicissitudes of the transference on the way to individuation." (p. 31)

"Via types, one has available a virtually forgotten compass to indicate what is happening within the patient, between patient and analyst, and within the analyst in the moment-to-moment, session-to-session progress of analysis." (p. 30)

He demonstrates what this "analytical psychotypology" is in the concrete by taking up the diagram used by Meier, and before him by Jung, and using it to explain actual case material. In this way it becomes much more comprehensible why certain projections take place, what the most promising pathway to development is, and even what the strengths and weaknesses of the analyst are in relationship to this particular- patient. Instead of seeing the analyst's particular typological weakness as a defect to be hidden, Groesbeck sees it as a golden opportunity for both the analyst and the analysand:

"Could it be that in precisely acknowledging the failure of the analysis, the door to the inferior functions can be opened to the archetypal levels of the psyche and the symbol of the inner healer can be constellated out of the uniting of the inferior functions of both analyst and patient?" (p. 41-2)

The dynamic role of the inferior function as the gateway to the unconscious and the self is seen in relationship to both analyst and analysand, and it is out of the union of their inferior functions that can come the fifth or transcendent function in which the former typological struggles can be resolved. In this connection he quotes Jung to point out that the transcendent function is not to be understood as "a basic function but as a complex function made up of other functions" (p. 42), and demonstrates how the inferior functions unite by undertaking the extensive analysis of an actual case. This is a view of the actual working of the inferior function that we should keep in mind when we later come across the question of bi-polarity.

Another good example of types taken dynamically and within analysis can be seen in John Beebe's "Psychological Types in Transference, Countertransference and the Therapeutic Interaction", which we will look at in the next chapter. Unfortunately, typological work within analysis is all too rare and much more attention should be paid to it within Jungian circles.

Type Diagnosis

This short excursion into typology within analysis, far from being esoteric, is an ideal preparation for examining the most practical of all questions in typology, that of type diagnosis. How can I determine my own or someone else's type? Types viewed from the point of view of individuation give us a better idea of the complexity of the meeting of two typological beings. When I meet you I receive a highly complicated mass of impressions. I don't just see the superior function and its attitude, but rather, I am receiving many messages simultaneously and I must find some way of organizing them. I am picking up information about all the functions and both attitudes and their respective states of development, and I am receiving this information in its concrete embodiment in individual words and events. It is from this matrix that I must abstract my typological perceptions. Typology does not relieve me of the need to be in direct contact with the individual. Far from it. It is a guide or compass in making sense of the individual impressions I receive. I don't impose it on the material, but I use it to organize the material that is already present. This is what Jung was insisting upon in' his various Forwards to Psychological Types. And much too often we underestimate the complexity of this material. I see your functions and attitudes and their state of development, but also the influence of your parents, education, the society you live in, the kind of work you do, the degree of your overall psychic integration, and the winds of your creativity in this moment, and habitually, which allow you, or even compel you, to show different sides of your personality.

But even this is a simplification, for I am only considering you and not myself. It would be more accurate to say the level of complexity must be doubled. Each impression I receive from you can be directed to various aspects of my own personality and provoke responses that condition my reception depending on my own type and its development, as well as its proclivities for projection, etc. Thus, Jung insists that without an understanding of my own personal equation I will scramble the messages and confuse what you are like with the way I imagine you to be. We could even try to describe the situation at a third level of complexity in which your words and actions provoke responses in me which, in turn, make you modify how you are relating to me, which, in turn, effects my reactions, and so forth and so on. But enough has been said to form the necessary backdrop against which to view the whole question of type diagnosis. It is also interesting to realize that over the years when Jung received letters about the question of types, he would insist, almost perversely at times, on their complexity. And this tendency came, I think, from his own keen understanding of how complex the whole matter is and how superficial some of our uses of typology have been.

The complexity of type can help us understand, for example, why we can type some people almost immediately and have our estimate confirmed by extensive contact, and then turn around and draw a complete blank with other people, or actually mistype them. We have our particular blind spots, and the people who we are typing can be setting off projections in us that effectively overwhelm the other impressions that we may be receiving about them. Or these people may be relatively undifferentiated or neurotic, and bewilder us with their perplexing barrage of material. Sometimes we make mistakes about those closest to us, or even ourselves, precisely because we are receiving material from all parts of the personality, and have not been able to adequately integrate it. The complexity of type precludes any easy solution to the question of type diagnosis. It would be nice to be able to appeal to the diagnostic powers of the Jungian analyst, but as we have seen, typological knowledge, especially in the practical order, is not identical with an understanding of the process of individuation. A. Plaut makes this clear in a description of his own tribulations:

"My former analyst thought that I could either be an intuitive- feeling type or possibly a thinking sensation type. Before I filled in my questionnaire, I had been diagnosed by one highly intuitive senior colleague as a sensation type. Another senior analyst told me that I was a thinking type. (Could it be that the inferior function easily appears in the form of shadow projections, thus clouding our clinical judgments?) A third colleague thought that I was an intuitive-thinking type. Being therefore uncertain I did the Gray-Wheelwright test and came out as 'intuitive-thinking' (introvert). The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, scored by a colleague, turned up quite unequivocally: INFP (introverted feeling perceptive with intuition, for short: introverted, feeling-intuition). As I dare not assume that I am fully integrated, I still prefer to rate myself as 'not sufficiently confident'. ("Analytical Psychologists and Psychological Types", P. 144)

It is this kind of diagnostic deadlock that has played a role in the creation of type tests and in attempts to put the whole issue of human differences on what would appear to be more secure scientific foundations. This brings us to our third audience for Jung's Psychological Types, the type test creators and users. And it is important to realize that the country we are entering differs from the analyst's consulting room. It belongs to another watershed. And this fact will become more and more apparent as we go on.

Psychological Type Tests

There are three major type tests that attempt to determine both attitude and function: the Gray-Wheelwright, the Myers-Briggs and the Singer-Loomis. (There are also experimental tests developed by Detloff, and Kingsbury and Skinner, etc.)

The Gray-Wheelwright

This test was developed by Joseph Wheelwright and Horace Gray. Wheelwright, one of the original San Francisco Jungians, had been initially attracted to Jungian psychology by typology, for he saw how useful it had been in his own marriage. He describes the origin of the test:

"Now, this type-test that I mentioned is a thing that Horace Gray and I spent a very long time working on during the war. And we involved Janie and, to a lesser extent, Joe Henderson in our struggles. Gray and I were actually perfect for the job, because I was an extraverted-intuitive-feeling type, and he was an introverted-sensation-thinking type; we figured that between us, we added up to one and we ought to be able to do it. So, we sat around, dreaming up questions. Feeling that charity began at home, the questions arose from our own conditions, as it were; then they were subjected to all kinds of testing out on people that had already been diagnosed clinically. Horace, who was a good mathematician, had stumbled on something that scientists seem to think a great deal of, called chi-square. This always made me very nervous, I don't know what chi-square means, and I'm determined that I never shall know. But he used it all the time, which apparently made the questions quite respectable." ("Psychological Types", p. 3)

All the participants in the creation of this test were Jungian analysts, and since it first appeared in 1944 it has gone through a series of revisions. The 15th of these revisions consists of 81 questions, all arranged in a forced-choice format where the test taker must choose between extraversion and introversion, thinking and feeling, and sensation and intuition.

The initial use of the test generated a series of articles by Horace Gray, some of which were co-authored by Joseph Wheelwright. In "Jung's Psychological Types, Their Frequency of Occurrence", Gray and Wheelwright review some of the data generated by early questionnaires that had been developed to test introversion and extraversion. And then they look at the results of the first 200 people to take their own test, and find that introversion outweighs extraversion 54% to 46%. In "Jung's Psychological Types in Relation to Occupation, Race and Body Build", Gray describes their motivation in creating the test and how it should be employed.

"The difficulties found by many in classifying individuals, even with the aid of his stout volume on psychological types, led us three years ago to devise a questionnaire covering all three aspects: attitude, perception, judgment. Trials and errors have led to repeated revisions, and even after a dozen such, more must follow. A questionnaire makes no pretense of replacing psychiatric interviews, much less any deeper psychological analysis, but it is a device for diagnosis." (p. 100)

With 1,000 test results in hand, they again found introversion 54% and extraversion 46%. Their results on the relationship between physical type and psychological type will occupy us later.

In "Jung's Psychological Types and Marriage" they studied 60 couples and found that 33% of them differed on all three measures, that is, extraversion-introversion, thinking-feeling and sensation-intuition. 30% differed in 2 measures, 27% in one, and 10% were alike in all three. They also plotted an intriguing balance:

"...if one partner is extremely marked for feeling valuations, the other partner is not merely on the thinking side, but is near its extreme. Or, if one is moderately feeling, the other is apt to be only moderately thinking. The same balancing was found for introversion vs. extraversion, and for sensation vs. intuition; ... This choice of spouse, with amazingly quantitative strength of complement, must, in consequence of popular ignorance of this phenomenon, be unconscious." (p. 38-9)

In "Jung's Psychological Types: Ambiguous Scores and Their Interpretation", various difficulties in administering the test and interpreting their results are examined. True to his statement that the tests do not stand alone, Gray places them in a wider context. For example, the test results of 62 people are compared with evaluating interviews presumably given by Gray and Wheelwright themselves. In 52% of the cases all three basic judgments agree, leaving 48% in which there is a disagreement in one or more areas. The biggest discrepancy was in the area of introversion and extraversion. When exploring how answers on one of the measures can effect another, Gray describes extraverts who, when asked "How many friends do you have?", answer, "Few", if their thinking function is strong. And he describes introverts who talk so profusely that they give the impression of extraversion. Both of these keen observations demonstrate the amount of clinical experience that was the foundation for the test.

The Gray-Wheelwright test has been subjected to a factor-analytic evaluation by Baumann, Angst, Henne and Muser, who concluded that the extraversion-introversion scale was the most reliable, followed by the intuition-sensation, with the thinking- feeling faring poorly.

Mary Ann Mattoon in her Jungian Psychology in Perspective summarizes some other studies evaluating the Gray-Wheelwright. These include a split-half reliability study, another that relied on test-retest and validity against the criterion of self-typing, and studies by Bradway, and Bradway and Detloff, who compared the self-typing of Jungian analysts with their results on the Gray-Wheelwright Test. These last two studies will engage our attention later.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

This is the most widely used of the full Jungian type tests, with a million answer sheets distributed by the end of 1979. It has appeared in various formats. Form F, for example, contains 166 questions, all of which are forced-choice and which include a number of word pairs, for example, which word would appeal to you more: active or intellectual? Once again the test had its origin in the practical circumstances of the test creator's marriage. When Isabel Briggs-Myers brought her prospective husband home, her mother, Katharine Briggs, concluded he was not like the other members of the family.

"She embarked on a project of reading biographies, and developed her own typology based on patterns she found. She identified meditative types, spontaneous types, executive types and sociable types (later identified in the MBT1 as the I's, the EP's, the ETJ's and the EFJ's). When Katharine Briggs discovered C.G. Jung's book, Psychological Types, she reported to her daughter, "This is it!" and proceeded to study the book intensely. Mother and daughter became avid "type watchers" over the next twenty years." (MBTI News, Vol. 2, No. 4, p. 2)

From these beginnings the test slowly evolved over the course of 40 years, with Myers testing thousands of school children, and medical students. In 1962 Educational Testing Services published a research version. In 1975 Consulting Psychologist Press brought out a version for general use, and it has spread widely since then. In the 1970s Isabel Myers worked with Mary McCaulley developing a Center for Applications of Psychological Type with its library, data bank, publications, and a mailing list of over 16,000 names. The Association for Psychological Types now has over 2,000 members in 10 countries. It is involved in publishing the Bulletin of Psychological Types and the journal of Psychological Types, holds national MBTI conferences, and so forth.

There has been an ever growing amount of literature about the use of this test. Let's pause for a moment and examine some examples of it to get its flavor.

James Hart, addressing himself to the question, "Are theoretical and methodological orientation an expression of psychology majors' personalities?", gave the MBTI and the theoretical orientation survey to 181 junior and senior psychology majors. He found that an objective orientation was related to high scores in extraversion, sensing, thinking and judging, while high scores in their opposites indicated a subjective orientation.

Alida Westman and Francis Canter in "Relationship Between Certain Circadian Behavior Patterns and Jungian Personality Types" had 24 adults rate themselves every two hours during the day on physical activity, concentration, and sociability, and gave these people the MBTI. Extraverts reported becoming more sociable from approximately 10 a.m. to noon to 2 p.m. and decreasing in their ability to concentrate between noon and 2 p.m. when they reported feeling happy, sociable and more relaxed.

In a more ambitious study John Ross compared the four scales of the MBTI with a battery of 32 different tests in 571 high school students. The first and most obvious factor that he derived, he felt, was one of general ability most manifest in a vocabulary test and also present negatively in the sensation-intuition scale. In another form of analysis he related liking to think with ENTJ, business information with ENTP, and gregariousness with ESFP.

In "Studies of Jungian Typology II: Representations of the Personal World" Rae Carlson, building on earlier work that found type differences in the performance of tasks involving short-term memory, the judgment of facial expressions and volunteer service, found: 1. the introverted thinking type and the extraverted feeling type differ in the quality of their affective memory; 2. thinking and feeling types differ in their emphasis on cognitive clarity vs. vividness of feeling; 3. sensation and intuitive types differ in their styles of self- description offered to an imagined foreign correspondent. In the last case the intuitives made direct or indirect references to the imagined other, while the sensing types introduced themselves in terms of their physical appearance.

James Witzig in "Jung's Typology and Classification of the Psychotherapies" tested 102 public health workers in such a way as to generate information about their own type preferences and how they would assign different hypothetical clients to different kinds of therapy. His questionnaire was based on items from the MBTI and generated results that supported his typological classification of therapies. In this classification:

"The individual approach is regarded as introversive and the group modality as extraversive. Psychotherapies are additionally classified according to function type: Thinking = Informational cognitive - includes educational, psychoanalytic, transactional and rational-emotive therapies; Intuition = Symbolic/intuitive -includes Jungian analysis, transcendental meditation and fantasy dominated procedures; Sensation = Sensory/experiential - includes Gestalt, bio-energetic, behavior modification, and most occupational therapies; Feeling = Confrontational/conative - includes psychodrama, client-centred and encounter methods." (P. 329)

Mattoon, in her Jungian Psychology in Perspective, concisely summarizes any number of studies which employ the MBTI. They include: changes in introversion and extraversion with age, whether friends are more similar or dissimilar in type, what types tend to marry each other, and how different types react in groups.

She also summarizes a number of studies that compare the MBTI with other introversion-extraversion tests, do split-half correlations, and other sorts of testing of the test similar to but more extensive to those that have accumulated around the GrayWheelwright Test.

A study by Stricker and Ross, "An Assessment of Some Structural Properties of the Jungian Personality Typology", turned up basically negative results when it found that the indicator scores did not have bimodal distributions and lacked other statistical attributes that they would have expected to accompany the existence of dichotomist types. The new edition of the MBTI Manual, A Guide to the Development and Use of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, 1985, presents extensive information on attempts to test the validity of the MBTI.

The manual provides extensive comparisons between the MBTI and many other inventories including the Eysenck Personality Questionnaires, the Jungian Type Survey, the 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF), Allport, Vernon and Lindsay's Study of Values, and the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory. The MBTI has found extensive use in school and business settings. (Moore, Keirsey and Bates, Lawrence, etc.)

This small sampling is dwarfed by the CAPT printout of MBTI studies which, when last I looked, contained over 1,100 items. Gille-Maisani briefly reviews dozens of studies on extraversion and introversion and psychological types in his Types de Jung et tempéraments psychobiologiques.

The Singer-Loomis Inventory of Personality

This is the work of two Jungian analysts, June Singer and Mary Loomis. It is not only the newest of the tests, but it is structured differently, for it does not make the assumption that the three measures of extraversion-introversion, thinking- feeling and sensation-intuition must be opposed to each other. The experimental edition has 120 questions grouped around 15 situations, and each question can be answered on a scale from I (never) to 5 (always). Situation 1, for example, states: "I have a free day coming up this week and will be able to do whatever I want. I would..." and then proceeds to name 8 possibilities, each to be answered on a scale from 1 to 5.

The 8 psychological types are viewed as independent cognitive modes, and the test attempts to measure their relative development in the individual. Since one type of development is not assumed to exclude another, the manual describes people with, for example, both introverted intuition and extraverted sensation highly developed. We will return to the question of bi-polarity when we look at new developments in the field of Jungian typology.

The development of these type tests and their application demonstrate the outward trajectory that Psychological Types has been following since its publication. The tests have arisen in large part in response to the diagnostic question, and they have given prominence to the interpersonal nature of types and brought Jung's ideas into the realm of the experimental psychologists.

Interpersonal Nature of Types

Outside professional Jungian circles it is clear that the interpersonal nature of types holds center stage, and there is no question that this kind of development is legitimate. We have seen the interpersonal interactions that helped Jung formulate his typology, and he, himself, used them to help explain to his patients their family conflicts. Typology is finding a fertile field of application in everything from marriage counseling to vocational guidance, and more people are probably being introduced to Jungian psychology through typology, especially in the form of type tests, than in any other way. Types are ideally formulated for dealing with normal people who will never see the inside of an analyst's office, but are in dire need of some way to make sense of the relationships they are involved in.

As positive as the development of this aspect of typology is, and despite the enthusiastic reception it is receiving in many quarters, it is important to look beyond these new and exciting beginnings and try to discern potential storm clouds forming on the far horizon.

The first of these dangers is that the stress on the interpersonal nature of types will make us lose sight of, or never realize, the full meaning of the intrapsychic nature of typology, which is the process of individuation itself. We can discover our type and be so caught up in discovering the types of those around us and unraveling the implications of these type differences that this genuine knowledge blinds us from seeing the full depth of typology. We become aware of our own typological configuration, but its dynamic nature is evident principally in relationship to other people and not as much in terms of our own development. Individuation, then, becomes foreshortened. It takes on the appearance of the broadening of the ego in which I balance my superior function with the auxiliaries. But this balance is very different from the balance produced by the self. It would be a shame if such a broadening and strengthening of the ego, as valuable as it is, were to be presented as a sort of ordinary man's individuation, instead of seeing that typology is an invitation to a new relationship between conscious and unconscious.

But typology seen as the doorway of individuation is not without its own problems, which it shares with Jungian analysis as a whole. In analysis there is a real and necessary concern with illness as well as health. The analyst must evaluate the potential danger the analytic process poses for the patient, especially in terms of latent psychosis. In discussing the dangers that face someone trying to go through a process of individuation by using active imagination Jung states that the most serious danger:

"is that the subliminal contents already possess such a high energy charge that when afforded an outlet by active imagination they may overpower the conscious mind and take possession of the personality." (1916/1957, p. 68)

This is the perspective in which he considers the question of lay analysis and says further of active imagination: "The method, therefore, is not without its dangers and should, if possible, not be employed except under expert supervision." (1916/1957, p. 68)

This is certainly a far different situation from administering a psychological type test, and then discussing with the test-taker the results and some of the practical applications it may have in his life. But we can't immediately say that the concerns of the analyst have nothing to do with this broader use of typology. There is something in the very nature of typology itself that leads to these issues, for typology is a visible manifestation of individuation. But what happens, then, if we begin to take typology seriously outside the analytic temenos and it leads us towards that fascinating and terrible night sea journey?

We are clearly caught in a dilemma to which there are no easy answers. If I say that typology will stay at the level of the ego and its development, I betray my misunderstanding of its real nature, but if 'I say that anyone who wishes to get seriously involved in typology should work with a Jungian analyst, I ignore certain practical realities: there are only a little more than 1,500 analysts in the world, they are clustered principally in large urban areas, at least in the United States, and they cost money. There is no way that they can contain the evergrowing interest in Jung's typology and through it, in his psychology, and put it in the analytic temenos in the narrow sense. To demand that everyone have direct access to a professional guide is equivalent to telling them that the most fruitful dimensions of typology and the most fundamental process of psychological development, which is individuation, must remain closed to them. Certainly people with particular and definite psychological problems should get professional help whenever possible, but the world of normal people is afflicted with serious problems that are so common they are perceived to be compatible with being normal: marriages being destroyed, conflicts between parents and children, our own mistaken attempts to fit societal norms that do not fit our type, and so forth. We are in desperate need of good psychological direction, and typology is one of the ideal ways to receive it.

The relationship between the growing world of typology and that of the professional Jungian analyst is comparable to that of the growing interest in nutrition and the small group of orthomolecular physicians and nutritionists that exists. These physicians and nutritionists, pioneering new treatments for everything from cancer to schizophrenia, cannot meet the enormous needs, and as a result, this sort of nutritional information circulates in non-professional circles and increasing numbers of people treat themselves as best they can. To call this an infringement on the medical profession would verge on hypocrisy, but this does not make it an ideal situation. The sick person and his family and friends are caught in a dilemma of either watching him die after traditional medicine has declared him terminal, or taking up in their inexpert hands the struggle for health not through drugs but through nutritional means. How happy they would be for an orthomolecular physician to walk through the door.

Typology is the psychological equivalent of good nutrition, and there is a tremendous need for it within marriage and family life, on the job, and so forth, as we have said. But we have to reckon with the fact that the more its use increases, the more it will open the door to the unconscious with its attendant dangers. The dangers have to be put in perspective in a world where illegal drugs are rampant and terrible psychological pressures are common, but the danger still exists. Typology should not be allowed to split into two different and separate worlds: the analyst dealing with its intrapsychic implications while others take up its interpersonal use. There is only one process of individuation viewed from different perspectives. If a temenos; is not possible around each individual, then it should be erected, as far as possible, around the whole movement of typology. The professional Jungian community has to understand the extent to which Jung's work is spreading, and employ some of that intuition that it favors so much to head off some of the potential dangers by its own involvement in typological affairs, while the newly developing group of Jungian typologists have to be aware of the inner dynamics of typology that lead to the trials of individuation.

Using Psychological Type Tests

Can a psychological type test solve the diagnostic problem? There are two ways to look at the question. First of all, a great deal of effort has gone into the construction of these tests and their validation. They condense into usable form extensive experience in typology and make available to us a reservoir of good questions. Therefore, they can be an important aid in making an evaluation of type. The test can be a check on our subjective impressions that can be misled by preconceived ideas and projections. If the test and our personal evaluations radically disagree, it is time to reconsider the matter. The test can help us focus our typological knowledge and experience and bring it to bear on the case at hand. We can go beyond the simple administration and scoring of the test and take up the questions one by one with the client and use them as a point of departure for developing a full-fledged typological interview that will combine objective and subjective elements. The test then becomes an impetus to correlate our subjective evaluations with the test scores and the self-understanding of the test-taker.

But there is a second way of using the test, which is less commendable. In it the test results become automatically the final results. The test becomes the sole way we diagnose type. It is the single tool at our disposal. We don't see. The test sees for us. We simply administer the test and assume that solves the diagnostic problem. This is too much to ask from any type test. The test was originally dependent on personal experience. In the initial construction of the MBTI, for example, observation necessarily had to precede any numerical results. "The initial questions were tested first on a small criterion group of about twenty relatives and friends whose type preferences seemed to the authors to be clearly evident from long acquaintance, and from a twenty-year period of "type watching"." (MBTI Manual, 1985, p. 142) Its questions and answers had to be evaluated against the clinical judgment of what the test-taker's type actually was. The questions are forced to break up into pieces what is actually connected in reality. Extraversion and thinking, for example, in the extraverted thinker, are not two separate factors, but one and the same thing. Then the test has to confront the enormous complexity that we saw in types themselves, and do all this by means of the self-report of the test-takers. The validation of the test from a statistical point of view is not identical with their authentication individual by individual, which is precisely where the results are most important.

The test creators themselves are often keenly aware of how things could be different: questions rephrased, and answers scored in a different manner. Isabel Briggs-Myers, when discussing the potential uses of the MBTI, felt the test is applicable in many areas, and can be put to good use by many kinds of decision- makers, but only, she admonishes: "if they will remember they are dealing with a theory and that the hypothesis the Indicator provides about a given person must always be submitted to their own informed and critical judgment. The Indicator is no substitute for good judgment. Being a self-report instrument, in any given case it could be wrong, no matter how high the scores.

"The safe and proper way to use the Indicator is as a stimulus to the user's insight." (MBTI Manual, 1962, p. 5) Chapter 5 of the new MBTI Manual presents a balanced approach to the problem entitled, "Initial Interpretation and Verification": "No questions, however accurate, can explain all human complexity. The MBTI results are a first step toward understanding the respondent's true preferences."

We have seen the quandary that A. Plaut landed in. Katherine Bradway gave the Gray-Wheelwright and the MBTI to 17 Jungian analysts who had typed themselves before the test. She compared the results without reference to the superior or auxiliary function (which, no doubt, would have made the results more dissimilar). The self-typing and the two tests agreed almost 100% on the evaluation of introversion and extraversion. This agreement falls to around 75% for sensation-intuition and a bit less for thinking and feeling. These results, which might be respectable from a statistical point of view, certainly can give us pause from a practical or clinical point of view. There is no reason to suppose that the analyst's judgments of themselves were completely correct, nor to imagine it was the tests or one of the tests which was completely accurate. Thirteen years later Bradway and Detloff looked at the issue again with 92 participants, this time just using the Gray-Wheelwright test. The results were similar. The classification of the whole type by self agreed with the Gray-Wheelwright results 58% of the time, and this is, again, combining the superior and auxiliary functions. Therefore, it becomes a question of how many times will the self-typing of the analyst and the results of the MBTI and Gray-Wheelwright and Singer-Loomis agree in typing a person?

A comparison between the MBTI and the Gray-Wheelwright highlights these difficulties in type testing, even when we make the admission that both tests are tapping into the same basic reality. In a study of 159 university students who took both tests, only 21% came out the same type on both instruments. In another study of 98 students the correlation between the different scores of the two tests were "E .68 (p<.01), 1 .66 (p<.01), S .54 (p<.01), N .47 (p<.01), T .33 (p<.01), and F .23 (p<.05)." (MBTI Manual, 1985, p. 209)

It would be unfair to appear to chastise the tests and leave the impression that diagnosis by Jungian analysts is better, even when it is a question of their own type. Introversion and intuition are outstanding in analysts' self-diagnosis and test-taking, but whether this is an actual fact or reflects their image of what they ought to be remains undecided. Probably it is some of both. The fundamental reason for not relying on the estimate of Jungian analysts is that their education in this area has often been sporadic at best. To return to our analogy between typology and nutrition, when we read Plaut's survey, we see that the Jungian analysts are like medical doctors when it comes to nutrition: some are profoundly immersed in it, others are distressingly ignorant, and in the profession as a whole it has not penetrated that nutrition is an integral and indispensable part of medicine. It may be that an analyst has learned typology through his own analysis, but if half the analysts find no great use for it in practice, there is no guarantee this will happen.

We have come to another dilemma. We can't rely implicitly either on self-reports or test results. There is no magic solution. We may decree that a person's type is whatever the tests say it is, but this decree need not coincide with reality. We have to hold on to the two horns of this dilemma: the clinical viewpoint and attempts to be more objective. Testing and observation by an experienced diagnostician should go together in order to accurately determine type. There are several principles that will aid successful diagnosis.

1. An intimate working knowledge of one's own type. This means not simply an accurate knowledge of what our type is, but the inner implications of this knowledge in terms of how it expresses itself in the myriad of details of our daily behavior, and especially how our inferior function, as well as the undeveloped aspects of the other functions, influence our conduct towards other people. Without a knowledge of our personal mechanisms of projection, how can we avoid them?

2. An extensive knowledge of the practical peculiarities of different types. This is an appreciation of the nuances and qualities that affect the function, not only when we consider whether it is introverted or extraverted, but the qualities it manifests in each of the four positions.

3. The use of a psychological type test in such a way that it becomes a key element in a typological interview that helps objectify our observations. This includes a dialogue with the client about what he considers his type to be. Naturally, the weight given to this self-report will have to vary with the degree that the person is informed about types. Someone who has just been introduced to typology can hardly be expected to render a definitive judgment that will bind himself and everyone else. Many people, however, do show a remarkable degree of insight after they have grasped the basic principles involved.

Type diagnosis becomes a three-way discussion between the person being diagnosed, the typologist and the objective testing. In this way we can limit the deficiencies that exist in each area. Though such a process is more time-consuming, in most situations where knowledge of type is to be the starting point for a process of self-development, even if an initial quick diagnosis is correct, it lacks the practical efficacious certitude that comes from a slower and more thorough process of typological discovery. If I am told I am an extraverted intuitive type, it does me little good as long as this remains a purely verbal definition, and I have generated no self-insight in how these typological principles can help me focus better on the actual course of my life.

The problem of diagnosis is a practical reflection of a wider issue in Jung's psychology and in psychology in general. What is the method that psychology ought to pursue? A divergence of method has already become apparent between the work of the analyst in his consulting room and the creators and users of the psychological type tests. It forms a microcosm of the differences that exist between Jungian psychology in general and experimental psychology. And this brings us back to the first audience who made use of the ideas of introversion and extraversion. Witzig reports that in the decade between 1966 to 1975 there were 692 experimentally designed studies of extraversion-introversion reviewed in Psychological Abstracts. But how many of these experimenters really read Psychological Types?

Two Conceptions of Psychological Science

Jung worked out of a medical and clinical background and relied heavily on personal contact and observation in order to discover the empirical facts upon which he based his typology. The experimental psychologists follow a model of science derived more closely from the physical sciences like chemistry and physics. Initial data is gathered through experimentation by a variety of techniques such as direct physical measurement and standardized written tests. And then it is submitted to mathematical analysis, especially factor analysis. This process yields a variety of factors which can explain the data and give rise to further experimentation, and it is natural that as Jungian typology became better known outside the analytic situation, it would undergo a process of objectification with the creation of various type tests, as we have seen.

But Jung conceived of his way of doing science somewhat differently. He based himself on the evidence of empirical facts, but he felt that evidence varied in kind from discipline to discipline. A fact in psychology, while it had to be empirical, i.e., observable, was not necessarily measurable by exact physical means: "The more we turn from spacial phenomena to the non-spaciality of the psyche, the more impossible it becomes to determine anything by exact physical measurement." (1931, p. 527) Nor could it always be determined by experimental means, for an experiment, he felt, imposed conditions on the psyche, and thus limited the range of the psyche's possible responses. He says:

"Experiment, however, consists in asking a definite question which excludes as far as possible anything disturbing and irrelevant. It makes conditions, imposes them on Nature, and in this way forces her to give an answer to a question devised by man. She is prevented from answering out of the fullness of her possibilities since these possibilities are restricted as far as practicable." (1952, p. 451)

It was not that Jung was unaware of experimental techniques, or completely ignored statistical methods. He realized at times it was extremely difficult to make the observations that supported his typology. But the only really adequate instrument for observing the whole psyche is the whole psyche itself.

Unfortunately, a sharp antagonism has grown up between what we can call the observational method and the experimental method. Instead of realizing the legitimate diversity of these methods, we attack one or the other. This is a form of epistemological imperialism that makes itself felt throughout all of psychology and has an impact on the development of Jung's typology. This imperialism is evident when Jung is portrayed as a myth-maker and mystic whose name is, unfortunately, connected with extraversion and introversion, and whose work forms a roadblock to the genuine scientific examination of this area. It is as if Jung, by some accident, stumbled on some typological ideas, which now must be taken up by real scientists, verified and developed.

This one-sided attitude has its counterpart, these days perhaps a more defensive one, on the part of more clinically-oriented people who ignore or write off attempts to construct a harder science of the human personality, and deride it as a technocratic fable which will find its culmination in rats instead of men. Neither attitude is justified. The first assumes there is only one method, which they possess, and whatever this method can embrace is psychology, and whatever falls outside it is unknowable. This becomes an accepted axiom, and mathematical technique begins to take the place of thought and generates a spate of studies which administer two tests, calculate the correlations, and state the results without attempting to see what these mathematical results mean in organic or real life terms.

On the other hand, the clinician, immersed in his own work, finds too little time and energy to ferret out the gems that exist in this flood of literature and translate them into a conceptual framework which will allow him to ask how they effect his own work. He can succumb to his own form of blindness in which his subjective opinion is elevated to the state of a dogma.

The question of method will return again and again as we proceed, but let's leave it for the moment and briefly look at something more congenial: some work that is being done in the field of experimental psychology. Many earlier studies were gathered in three volumes in Readings in Extraversion-Introversion, edited by Eysenck. They included articles on the higher sedation thresholds of introverts and their lower auditory and pain thresholds, as well as the higher pain tolerance of extraverts. Dicks-Mireaux summarizes some of the early experimental work on introversion and extraversion from a Jungian perspective, reviewing Eysenck, Cattell and Guilford. More bridge-building was done by Marshall in his "Extraversion and Libido in Jung and Cattell", and "The Four Functions, a Conceptual Analysis".

Eysenck in The Structure of Human Personality provides an extensive review of various theories in the field of human differences. After discussing Jordan and Gross, both of whom Jung wrote about in Psychological Types, he devotes a few pages to Jung himself. He examines Jung's idea that the extravert in cases of neurotic breakdown is predisposed to hysteria, and the introvert to psychasthenia, a matter which Eysenck studied experimentally. He recognizes as implicit in Jung "a second factor additional to, and independent of, that of extraversion-introversion. This factor we may provisionally call "abnormality" or "neuroticism"." (p. 24) And then Eysenck goes on to add a third axis to the first two, which he calls "psychotism", and he is concerned that this psychotic factor will be mistakenly viewed only as an extreme form of neuroticism, a view which he does not find justifiable.

Let us simply list a few more articles that could interest the Jungian typologist and perhaps inspire him to develop Jung's work further. These include the relationship between the AB blood group and introversion, various studies about extraversion-introversion and the EEG, and a constant stream of material appearing in The Journal of Personality and Individual Differences, for example, "Intelligence and Personality in Mate Choice and Marital Satisfaction", "Delinquent Personality Types and the Situational Contexts of their Crimes".

Jung's typology needs to be brought into relationship not only with the world of experimental psychology but beyond it to the world of literature, philosophy and art. William Willeford and James Hillman make efforts to put Jung's typological thought in a wider cultural perspective, and the ripples set off by the publication of Psychological Types grow ever wider as Jung's thought effects more and more people and they, in turn, relate it to more and more areas. Two notable examples of this process can be found in Hermann Rorschach's Psychodiagnostik, published in 1921, which tries to develop an objective assessment of extraversion and introversion, and in Roberto Assagioli's creation of psychosynthesis. A comparison of Rorschach and Jung was done by Brawer and Spiegelman. While Rorschach initially disclaimed any influence of Jung, Assagioli felt closest to Jung among all the modern psychotherapists, and he takes into account the four functions so neglected outside of Jungian circles. In his own schema of the psyche he groups six functions around the self and the will. In addition to the four Jungian functions we find imagination or fantasy, and a group of functions "that impel us towards action in the outside world". Perhaps it would not be amiss to recognize in these last two functions something of Jung's introversion and extraversion. (Keen, p. 98) Even Arnold Toynbee used Jung's theory of psychological types in his Study of History when he attempted to differentiate between the major world religions. He suggested that Hinduism represented a predominance of introverted thinking, Christianity extraverted feeling, Islam extraverted sensation and Buddhism introverted intuition.

It is well to pause for a moment and review where we have been before we come upon some of the most interesting sights in our exploration of Jung's typology: the new developments in type theory. We started with Jung's Psychological Types and proceeded to see how it had been taken up and developed in three distinctive ways: within analysis, by psychological type tests, and from an experimental point of view. We saw that interwoven in all these areas was a preoccupation with two major questions: type diagnosis and method. And it is well we have noticed this, for it will have sensitized us to recognize the important role these issues play in new type theories.

  

 

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